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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
121 of 128 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A credible portrait of a destructive cartoon character,
By
This review is from: Bare-faced Messiah: True Story of L.Ron Hubbard (Hardcover)
It gives you chills to consider that present Scientologists might believe even one-tenth of the lunacy of the L. Ron Hubbard that this book reveals as a paranoid, authoritarian, self-aggrandising, destructive, and pathalogical ( ).Hubbard was clearly a severly disturbed individual, and his motivation for founding Scientology was also clearly a direct result of his delusions and desire for attention, and, later, for cash. Scientology itself is revealled as a mixture of pop psychology, new age healing techniques, and belief in our heritage as space aliens - all three spiced-up by the illicit thrill that only secret knowledge (priced in US$ of course) can bring. In other words, welcome to 20th Century free market Gnosticism, with a bit of everything tossed in, for good measure, by a deranged cook that seems to have no taste buds at all. Even assuming (following the death of Hubbard) there has been a corporate sanitising of the whackier aspects of his philosophy (and trust me here, the book is overflowing with examples of these), the fact that anyone would choose such an obviously broken foundation stone to build anything on, is enough cause for the alarm bells to start ringing. The book is exhaustively researched and is a completely mind-blowing read, as the reader gets to walk a path from a creative childhood in which we learn about Hubbard's natural talent for story-telling that later developed into his relatively successful science-fiction career, to a progressively-stunted adulthood where lies becomes the main creative media he works with. It would be good to see a follow up that deals less with Hubbard and more with how the Scientologists absorbed his legacy into their current practice (quite well, it would seem, from the myriad of media reports of destructive cultic behaviour). Now that would take some explaining. But this is outside the scope of this biography. The book has a ring of authenticity thanks to the well-established credentials of the journalist who wrote it, and thus stands as a credible portrait of a destructive cartoon character that - unfortunately - more than a few people saw as their messiah.
47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great reading for the Summer of Scientology,
By Vidlyvid (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Bare-faced Messiah: True Story of L.Ron Hubbard (Hardcover)
No, that's not an official title. But Summer '05 has definitely been the Summer of Scientology in the media, and I realized that to participate in the debate, I needed to know more about the Church and its founder. And while the author of this book (a former Fleet Street journalist) is clearly no friend of L Ron, it's hard to blame him in light of the simple facts surrounding the church, its history, and its founder. I don't think anyone, celebrities included, could put a positive spin on Operation Snow White, Scientology's attempt to steal and destroy government documents related to the church, performed via "covert operatives" over a period of ten years or more. Yes, they were busted. And why don't people talk about this when talking about the Church? Not sure. They also don't talk about L Ron's abandonment of his first two wives, and his eagerness to let the third take the fall for Snow White when it all shook out. It makes you wonder about the geniuses in the marketing department over in Clearwater.
But the book isn't as much about the Church as it is about the man who founded it - a fascinating guy, by any account, even his own. As the book says, L Ron didn't need to embellish and manipulate his life's story nearly as much as he did, since the facts of his upbringing, education, and career are pretty amazing in and of themselves. Friends of psychology and psychiatry will recognize a narcissist when they see one, although a very entertaining one. Overall, this was a great read - I had expected it to be a bit more damning and vindictive, based on other reviews (and the crazy paperback cover, which looks like a soft core/science fiction novel). But after reading it, I was very impressed with the author's restraint.
48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent bio of one the century's greatest con artists.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Bare Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (Hardcover)
L. Ron Hubbard, "founder" of Scientology, has the true story of his life laid bare in this book by Russell Miller. The book proves that Hubbard was a remarkable man... Though not at all in the way Scientologists are taught. Hubbard, who wrote science fiction for pulp magazines at a penny-a-word in the 40s, hit upon the realization that "the way to make real money is to start a religion," leading to the birth of Dianetics and Scientology. This book tracks the amazing life of Hubbard- from his humble beginnings which he felt compelled to embellish upon; through a disastrous stint in the Navy, where he later claimed to have been the first U.S. serviceman wounded in WWII; to the jailing of his wife and nearly a dozen of Scientology's top management in the early '80s for illegal break-ins and infiltration of government agencies; and, finally, to his death in 1986 in a trailer in the desert- addicted to drugs and delirious. Bare Faced Messiah is required reading for anyone even vaguely aware of the controversies that have surrounded the man, and his "church," since its beginning.
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