Buy new:
$16.82
FREE delivery: Tuesday, April 23 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon
Sold by: Solve Books
List Price: $23.00 Details

The List Price is the suggested retail price of a new product as provided by a manufacturer, supplier, or seller. Except for books, Amazon will display a List Price if the product was purchased by customers on Amazon or offered by other retailers at or above the List Price in at least the past 90 days. List prices may not necessarily reflect the product's prevailing market price.
Learn more
Save: $6.18 (27%)
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
FREE delivery Tuesday, April 23 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or fastest delivery Friday, April 19. Order within 14 hrs 6 mins
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
$$16.82 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$16.82
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
Amazon
Ships from
Amazon
Sold by
Sold by
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Payment
Secure transaction
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime
FREE delivery Thursday, April 25 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Or fastest delivery Friday, April 19. Order within 14 hrs 6 mins
Used: Good | Details
Sold by Martistore
Condition: Used: Good
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Other Sellers on Amazon
Added
$16.75
& FREE Shipping
Sold by: PHIMARREM Enterprises LLC
Sold by: PHIMARREM Enterprises LLC
(432 ratings)
94% positive over last 12 months
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Shipping rates and Return policy
Added
$12.77
+ $3.99 shipping
Sold by: M R . B O O K M A N
Sold by: M R . B O O K M A N
(8023 ratings)
97% positive over last 12 months
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Shipping rates and Return policy
Added
$12.88
+ $3.99 shipping
Sold by: beethovens_books
Sold by: beethovens_books
(2250 ratings)
92% positive over last 12 months
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Shipping rates and Return policy
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Jesus Land: A Memoir Hardcover – September 6, 2005

4.3 out of 5 stars 117

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$16.82","priceAmount":16.82,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"16","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"82","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"OTbLqenpQ5N4XUSA7I6NtsQJy4VeOfBkYnA4sZJFU%2B%2BBuEO7A59iFZiuU6QhlDHpKzst5NbIXZCtQEw2kXQuI9COGogfyzs4%2BNm5xoA%2Bvg3b12FnhIuzsLEOZ7Dq9jnbsn9d4hX70QYohK%2FMQdwD9QQI0gTPvvqkyIDC%2FdyIbl%2FvDreNXQkR4W%2Fc8ZSFpKbd","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$10.64","priceAmount":10.64,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"10","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"64","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"OTbLqenpQ5N4XUSA7I6NtsQJy4VeOfBkv3zoWlnsKyLGdPq1t24pFxKqoeDOfAIYl47f0XvVNFa%2BQvupOiU2E3tc8gcGvuqpjqS83z2xR7Ryxjk6Hau4WnWIali8TJ4LaLkR1sHF%2Bov%2BXhVP2NjItLd%2Bcy%2FoadXgqtLQmraAyJ9i%2FXOgQQdohM6qd84%2FmHP9","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

For Julia Scheeres and her adopted brother David, "Jesus Land" stretched from their parents' fundamentalist home, past the hostilities of high school, and deep into a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. For these two teenagers - brother and sister, black and white - the 1980's were a trial by fire.
In this memoir, Scheeres takes us from the familiar Midwest, a land of cottonwood trees and trailer parks, to a place beyond her imagining. At home, the Scheeres kids must endure the usual trials of adolescence - high-school hormones, incessant bullying, and the deep-seated restlessness of social misfits everywhere - under the shadow of virulent racism neither knows how to contend with. When they start to crack (or fight back), they are packed off to Escuela Caribe.
This brutal, prison-like "Christian boot camp" demands that its inhabitants repent for their sins - sins that few of them are aware of having committed. Julia and David's determination to make it though with heart and soul intact is told here with immediacy, candor, sparkling humor, and not an ounce of malice. Jesus Land is, on every page, a keenly moving ode to the sustaining power of love, and rebellion, and the dream of a perfect family.

The Amazon Book Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Journalist Scheeres offers a frank and compelling portrait of growing up as a white girl with two adopted black brothers in 1970s rural Indiana, and of her later stay with one of them at a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. The book takes its title from a homemade sign that Scheeres and the brother closest to her in age and temperament, David, spot one day on a road in the Hoosier countryside, proclaiming, "This here is: JESUS LAND." And while religion is omnipresent both at their school and in the home of their devout parents, the two rarely find themselves the beneficiaries of anything resembling Christian love. One of the elements that make Scheeres's book so successful is her distanced, uncritical tone in relaying deeply personal and clearly painful events from her life. She powerfully renders episodes like her attempted rape at the hands of three boys, the harsh beatings administered to David by her father and the ceaseless racial taunting by schoolmates; her lack of perceivable malice or vindictiveness prevents readers from feeling coerced into sympathy. The same can be said for Scheeres's description of their Dominican school, where humiliation and physical punishment are meant to redeem the allegedly misguided pupils. Tinged with sadness yet pervaded by a sense of triumph, Scheeres's book is a crisply written and earnest examination of the meaning of family and Christian values, and announces the author as a writer to watch.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In the name of religion, Scheeres and her adopted black brother, David, suffer cruel abuse, first in their Calvinist home in Indiana in the 1970s and then when their surgeon father and missionary-minded mother send the teens to a fundamentalist Dominican Republic reform school that is run like boot camp. The self-righteous sermonizing would be hilarious if it were not the justification for vicious punishment. The racism is open, from the other kids and from authority. Scheeres tries to find comfort in drink and in sex with a classmate ("His heat and his desire they comfort me. I shall not want"). What is unforgettable is the tenderness between sister and brother, as uplifting as any sermon. Their relationship is never sentimentalized: She is ashamed of the times she turns her back on him, tired of being called "nigger-lover . . . the black boy's sister," but they help each other through the worst with horseplay, humor, and courage. The writing is Dickensian in its blend of the tender, the brutal, and the absurd. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Counterpoint; First Edition (September 6, 2005)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1582433380
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1582433387
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.12 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.25 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 117

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Julia Scheeres
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Julia Scheeres is the author of the New York Times bestseller Jesus Land, a memoir about her relationship with her adopted black brother David. The brother and sister grew up in a small Indiana town and, as teens, were sent to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic together. The book explores the themes of race, fundamentalist religion, and the sustaining bond of sibling love.

Her second book, A Thousand Lives, will be published by Free Press in October 2011.

She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two daughters and works at the San Francisco Writers Grotto.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
117 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2024
My husband and I mostly listened to the book on audible during drives and wow, it was something. Truly touching and makes you think. Definitely recommend a read.
Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2014
As I read "Jesus Land," I kept asking myself whether it is possible that these events really happened. How could anyone subject a little girl and a little boy to such insanity. I asked myself those questions even though I know that they really did occur.

I want to thank Julia Scheeres for being rawly vulnerable and in so doing, allowing us to feel, taste, hear, smell, and see the oftentimes ugly events of her childhood and teenage years. This book is yet another volume that I could not put down. Well, I did put it down in order to sleep, but it was just a two day read. Yes, I blocked out the universe as I fell into the despair and hope of young children. I so desperately wanted to jump right into her early life and knock some common sense into those who held physical power over her life. I am so thankful that Ms. Scheeres is now leading a healthy life, free of the craziness that others tried unsuccessfully to imbue into her soul.

Yes, get this book. Read "Jesus Land" to understand a little boy's and a little girl's survival in the face of craziness. Read it to hone your senses and pick up on cues of what may be taking place in your lives today. Read it because you must find inspiration in how normal, typical human beings can overcome what can truly be described as brainwashing, emotional torture, and horrible physical abuse.

Once you finish reading this book, read Ms. Scheeres other book on the Jim Jones/People's Temple massacre in Guyana, 
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown . In this second book, Ms. Scheeres provides the most detailed and historical accounting of the Jonestown massacre available.
24 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2005
Writing in the present tense, Julia Scheeres writes about her ordeal with two abusive parents who hide their virulent hostility behind an obsession with biblical platitudes. They move their three children Julia and her two adopted brothers, both African American, David and Jerome, to a farm house in Indiana where they encounter cruelty and racism at school and just about anywhere out of their home and receive more cruelty--in the name of the biblicial injunction "to not spare the rod"--inside their home as well. But Julia is spared and she feels guilty for being untouched while her black brothers are whipped and beaten. The abuse is also psychological: Christian radio is blurted into their rooms at six in the morning, spy speakers are on 24 hours a day so all conversations can be heard by the mother from any place in the house, they are force-fed with bible verses, they are subjected to tedious farm labor in the hot humid sun. When her two adopted brothers misbehave, which is often, they are beaten and whipped in the basement with belts, two by fours, and other weapons. Their bare backs have welts and scars. Julia tries to defend her brothers but cannot. She takes to drinking as solace from her sadistic parents. Things get worse when her older brother sexually abuses her. Eventually, she and her younger brother David, who are very close and who are at the center of this book, are sent to a Christian boot camp in Latin America, which is so over-the-top cruel and controlling it could be taken from the pages of Kafka's In the Penal Colony. Not only is Scheeres' book a true account; it's a recent one. I would have thought this kind of abuse and mind-control died over a hundred years ago. I guess I was wrong.

Scheeres' prose is lucid, clear, never full of self-pity. She writes without a chip on her shoulder. Her real motive is to express her undying love for her younger brother David, for whom this memoir is dedicated to.

If you enjoy Scheeres' harrowing account, you might want to check out Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Samual Butler's The Ways of All Flesh.
134 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2014
The book itself gets 5 stars, the supplier gets 1. I had read this book years ago and bought a copy for a friend for Christmas. I was too embarrassed to give it to her as it had stains on the front. Not worth the hassle of a return during Christmas season. Booooo.
Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2019
This book showed me the difference between the writing craft of show vs tell. The imagery from the outset shocked me. It is my favorite kind of book to read, one that enables my imagination to go in fifth gear.

The story is relatable in the sense that I was raised Calvanist and sent to boarding school, but not a heinously abusive one.

Her relationship with her brother tops all. I cried like a baby.

Thank you Julia Scheeres for sharing your story, and I mean share because now it is a part of me.

Also, thank you for writing your recent NYT article on raising children without a sin consciousness. If only we could all do that. I gave it my best try, but my years of indoctrination that I am at my core a sinner got in the way, causing me to be depressed and angry. You are absolutely a forerunner in this field of ex-vangelicalism.
3 people found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2015
Julia Scheeres tells an amazing (true) story that kept me captivated from beginning to end.
One person found this helpful
Report
Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2007
Julia has a unique perspective that not many people can claim, she is a white woman who grew up with two black brothers. This life experience has enabled her to write about the experience of racism from both sides, and with absolutely heart breaking detail. As a white person, it made me question myself - "do I understand the experience of living as a black person?" Of course I don't, but I didn't realize just how difficult it can be, especially in less accepting parts of the country. This story is set about 20 years ago, but of course this kind of hatred persists today, and it is appalling. Racism is a large theme in the story, but it also deals with family, religion, and the realization that sometimes you just can't trust anyone.

I sometimes skip over the epilogue in a book, but make sure you read it. It brought me to tears and gives you more of an understand of how she was able to so eloquently tell this story.

I read memoirs frequently, and this is one of the best I've read.
2 people found this helpful
Report

Top reviews from other countries

Cheryl Deshane
5.0 out of 5 stars A must buy ,couldn’t put it down
Reviewed in Canada on June 10, 2020
Captured my heart