Customer Reviews

I Was a Teenage Jehovah's Witness

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read one of Nate's other books, Jehovah Unmasked, and liked it, so I bought "Teen Witness" directly from his web-site. I figured the book would be good, but not as good as the hype. However, it was everything the ads say! I read it all the way through in a single sitting and then started in again. Teen Witness has actual literary merit besides being a lot of fun. Nate Merritt is one of those writers who can take you directly to whatever or wherever it is he's writing about and it all comes completely alive in your mind.

Nate lived one of the most frightening, funny, intense, and crazy lives I've ever heard of. He enabled me to feel everything he felt as he opened his heart and mind in the pages of Teen Witness. The ads don't say enough. From having to deal with a racist homophobic "rageaholic" father to getting sucked into the Jehovah cult, to becoming a scary and violent gang member, and then a Jehovah again, then being kicked out and becoming a stone cold terrifying thug, to a wonderful ending that made me laugh and cry, this is the single most exciting and downright fun book I've read in many years.

There are some truly weird surprises here too, such as when Nate "dropped acid" for the first time after he ran away to go live with his Mom in San Jose. This is one of the funniest interludes in anybody's life I've ever read. Also, Nate protected a fourteen year od runaway rape victim and nearly got himself killed. There's just so much here. I hope he writes more about his teenage years!

This is not a ghost-written "How I became a Christian" spiel, but a wonderful look into a teenaged boy's point-of-view and a deeper and perhaps more frightening view of what life was like in the Jehovah Witnesses just before Jehovah was due back to kill all us no good non-JW's. I loved the pithy dialogue, the darkness, the incredible humor (worth reading just for his first acid trip alone), the whole flavor of the book is wonderful and not just of interest to those of a religious bent, but also a great view into the thought processes of a teen. It has a biting, wonderful taste of life and I highly recommend it.

This book is fantastic! I loved Nate Merritt's writing style, the way he swept you through the story. I found myself laughing out loud so many times, so so funny and such a great story. I am going to see what else he's written and order it, he's a fantastic writer. I don't know what his plans are for the rest of his life but I suggest he writes, writes, writes! I put down 9 out of 10 books that I start due to bad writing, bad story line etc. I couldn't even get through the Davinci Code, it was such horrible writing in my opinion, but this book did what all books should do; grab your interest and not let go. :)

I Was a Teenage Jehovah's Witness is not a work of fiction; it's the true story of a boy, who liked a girl on the bus, and--oops! ended up in a brainwashing cult. A sort of slip, banana-peel style, into a pit of cosmic slime. Truth is always stranger than fiction. Nathan's descent into the network of fear and lies that are the bedrock of the JW's drafting policy, is a gripping tale of teenage angst like none you've read before.

As you make the painful journey with the author, from troubled teen to gun weilding maniac, you will laugh, cry, and become extremely nervous about groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses.

The book illustrates how cults can use the vulnerability, intelligence, and natural curiosity of a teenager as a springboard for their own selfish designs. The way the JW's insinuated themselves into the author's life and mind is very disturbing, and the fact that much duplicity was involved will evoke a strong sense of injustice from the reader.

I highly recommend this book, especially to anyone who has had experience in freeing themselves from the bondage of a religious cult (and who love a hell of an adventure story).

I found this book to be very boring because the author was hung up on his sexual urges and that became very boring after awhile. The author came from a dysfunctional family to begin with (they were not Jehovah's Witness) and I believe the book is misleading because he was not raised as a Jehovah's Witness and when he left or was disfellowshipped, he had family and friends to return to. Those teenagers and young people who suffer the same fate (disfellowshipped) are left with no one to turn to when they have been raised in the Watchtower religion. During my years in the Watchtower religion, I knew so many pitiful young people who were raised in this cult and then cast out and I could not find any sympathy for this author and I believe he was the cause of most of his problems. In the first place, he wasn't really interested in religion when he got involved - he was merely following his raging hormones. In summary, the book was very disappointing.

If there was ever a book that exposes both the deep scars of fundamentalist Christianity and the deep existential angst of teens in America this is it. Through a dark humorous eye, Nate reveals his journey through his younger years in the Midwest, traveling through all valleys and almost no peaks. At one turn there is the confusion and rage of maturing in a modern society, at another there is his escapism into either drugs or the drug of the Jehovah Witness Cult. In between, Nate deals with the usual demons of a dysfunctional family, the confusion of young love, and the constant bad decision-making of adolescents. Yet this is not a dark book, for it is seasoned with irony, the small victories we all taste in life and some very touching moments of clarity. In the end, it's a lesson about how nothing that glitters is truly gold except the inner shine of one's perseverance and the brilliance of loyal friends.

Oh, and a lesson about staying away from Christian cults.

Abraxas

This review is from my good friend, Didier Fougeras, in Belle-Eglise France. Unfortunately, he does not have an Amazon reviewers account, so I am posting this review on his behalf:

"Nate is a great writer, with a remarkable sense of narrative structure in addition to devastatingly racy style. The result is a both exhilarating and heartbreaking, continuously thrilling story you are eager to come back to (if you don't read it in one night as 'justsomedude' did). No need to repeat the excellent summary in VM44's post. But one thought that came to my mind quite a few times while reading is: you cannot be faithful to your memories unless you dare reinventing them. This, I think, is just what Nate did, and brilliantly so. Instead of merely recounting "objective facts" -- or, even worse perhaps, assessing them in the deceiving light of later "mature" judgement -- he recreates the on-the-spot emotions, thoughts, fantasies and daydreams of the sensitive teenage prankster he was, embarking you on a breathtaking subjective ride he must first have lived as a writer -- a perspective way more fascinating than that of the fly on the wall we often wish to be as far as "history" is concerned. On the JW side, his neophyte enthusiasm, his nearly immediate disillusionments, his flip-floppings he really shares, with blunt creative honesty. This is well worth a couple of possible factual mistakes. This book will probably never make it into most churches' and other anti-cult libraries -- just too hard, in more than one sense. And it sure may scare the prudish or the faint-hearted. But it will delight many JWD posters, and probably enlighten many more lurkers. Just forget about the JWD posting guidelines when you get into it." -Didier Fougeras