Father and Son

You have never read such a warm, loving portrait of a monster. This is the memoir of a boy growing up in a Christian cult in the 1850s, the cult was the Plymouth Brethren, and the father of this son was a guy who had drunk the koolaid. In fact he drank a gallon of it every day. It was Jesus this, th......more

Another book I discovered through listening to the wonderful Backlisted podcast. Edmund Gosse (21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928) was an English poet, author and critic. He was strictly brought up in a small Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren, but broke away sharply from that faith. Father and Son......more

This book was right up my alley in that my upbringing paralleled the author's - in spite of being over a century later. Like him, I was brought up in the Plymouth Brethren which, in 1960s-70s New Zealand, as in 1850s-60s England, meant a fixation on literalism, a consequent dryness and lack of imagi......more

An account of Edmund Gosse’s journey from childhood to adulthood and his struggle with his conscience being brought up by his father Philip a Plymouth Brethren. It is a chronicle of religious fanaticism in the Victorian era in the 1860s. The death of his mother when he was a child created a vacuum a......more

And he said we must judge not, lest we ourselves bejudged. I had just enough tact to let that pass, but I was quite aware that our whole system was one of judging, and that we had no intention whatever of being judged ourselves. Yet even at the age of eleven one sees that on certain occasions to pre......more