Uncultured
A Memoir
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"A painful and propulsive memoir delivered in the honest tones of a woman who didn’t always think she’d live to tell her story." —The New York Times
A Buzzfeed Best Book of September
In the vein of Educated and The Glass Castle, Daniella Mestyanek Young's Uncultured is more than a memoir about an exceptional upbringing, but about a woman who, no matter the lack of tools given to her, is determined to overcome.
Behind the tall, foreboding gates of a commune in Brazil, Daniella Mestyanek Young was raised in the religious cult The Children of God, also known as The Family, as the daughter of high-ranking members. Her great-grandmother donated land for one of The Family’s first communes in Texas. Her mother, at thirteen, was forced to marry the leader and served as his secretary for many years. Beholden to The Family’s strict rules, Daniella suffers physical, emotional, and sexual abuse—masked as godly discipline and divine love—and is forbidden from getting a traditional education.
At fifteen years old, fed up with The Family and determined to build a better and freer life for herself, Daniella escapes to Texas. There, she bravely enrolls herself in high school and excels, later graduating as valedictorian of her college class, then electing to join the military to begin a career as an intelligence officer, where she believes she will finally belong.
But she soon learns that her new world—surrounded by men on the sands of Afghanistan—looks remarkably similar to the one she desperately tried to leave behind.
Told in a beautiful, propulsive voice and with clear-eyed honesty, Uncultured explores the dangers unleashed when harmful group mentality goes unrecognized, and is emblematic of the many ways women have to contort themselves to survive.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Daniella Mestyanek Young was born into the controversial Children of God cult and was sexually trafficked and abused across Asia and South America until she escaped at 15. Resettling in Houston, she joined the U.S. Army, only to realize that life in the atmosphere of the military was frighteningly similar to her tragic past. Daniella is unblinkingly raw in telling her stunning story, from her horrifying childhood to her time in combat in Afghanistan. The optimism comes from the strength of her perseverance and unwavering belief in herself. This sobering read reveals harsh truths about the pervasiveness of cultlike thinking even in unexpected places, making it a must-read gut punch of a memoir.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mestyanek Young's page-turning debut details her escape from the Children of God religious cult and her disillusionment after joining the U.S. Army. Born into the Children of God, the author endured relentless extreme hunger, as well as sexual and physical abuse at the hands of the "Uncles," or predatory elder male cult members, throughout her childhood. "After fifteen years of... life in a religious prison camp," she escaped, leaving behind her family and quickly discovering how ill-prepared she was for the outside world ("You don't exist," a secretary told Mestyanek Young when she first tried to enroll in public school as a teenager). The author landed a job at Chick-fil-A and finally got admitted to high school, where her guidance counselor encouraged her to dream big. Determined to prove her worth to the world, Mestyanek Young joined the Army but found it to be another institution in which powerful men asserted control over her and the threat of sexual violence was omnipresent. In Afghanistan, she contended with the horrors of war alongside discrimination, isolation, and sexual assault. Mestyanek Young searingly captures the fear and intensity that were her constant companions in the Children of God, and she draws smart parallels between the dogmatic "indoctrination" she encountered in both the cult and the Army, observing that "wherever there is programming, the code can be written wrong." Readers won't be able to put down this harrowing and enthralling memoir.
Customer Reviews
Amazing story
Daniella’s story is incredible. I would recommend this to anyone. Absolutely mind blowing and touching.
Chilling reality.
Fitting in to society is one of humanity’s most primal urges. In her memoir, Daniella Mestyanek Young tells the story of her attempt to fit into worlds that don’t make sense, and of her ultimate discovery that she is better than the organizations that abused and rejected her. Her story is also a warning to all of us - that there are evil and powerful people all around that will harm us and the people we love if we make mistakes in their presence that they can exploit. Simultaneously, it is also a story of hope - hope that there are good people that can and will help us break the bonds that evil people use to control others.
Mestyanek Young has had an interesting, unusual, tragic, and amazing life so far. Born to a teen mother into the Children of God religious cult, her story begins in a compound in Brazil where she suffers abuses and mistreatment from the time she is a toddler. Although the adults she is supposed to trust tell her that what is happening to her is normal and right, she knows innately that what is happening is wrong as the cult “Aunties” and “Uncles” fail to inculcate their evil values into her.
After suffering through physical beatings and sexual assaults, she manages to escape the religious cult at fifteen years old, and make her way to Houston, Texas. With the help of some friends, teachers, and a guidance counselor, she manages to graduate high school and get through college. All the while, she struggles to find her place in a world that she did not grow up in. Unsure of what future she seeks for herself, the struggle leads her into her first marriage, which presents a new set of abuses that she must endure. She ends up deciding to join the US Army and become a military intelligence officer. During her time in service and two tours in Afghanistan, she recognizes parallel structures and dynamics between the Children of God cult and the US Army. Unfortunately, recognition of these patterns and systems of abuse is not enough to help to her avoid becoming the victim of powerful, evil people once again.
The most horrifying and chilling fact of this story is that it’s all true, that it happened, and that these men are still out there in the world. It is easy to use the information Mestyanek Young provides, and search the internet to see who these men are and what they’ve done. “Uncle Jerry,” “Major Poole,” “Captain Mike,” and “Colonel Maxwell” are all still out there and living comfortably among us, and the people we love. That thought scares me to no end.
This is not simply a story of a woman suffering abuse. It is a story about how people will ignore evil to fit in. It is a story of how men and women who benefit from power given to them by evil and abusive institutions will not risk their power and status to make things better. It is a story about how many of us have accepted certain degrees of sexism, racism, and violence as innocuous or as “just be way the world is,” and how that attitude does incredible damage to people.
Most of all, it’s a statement that good people - even if they make mistakes along the way - should not accept the abuses of these systems, institutions, and cults any longer. It is a call to action for the good people who do stand to lose their power to stand up and do something to recognize the evil, and eradicate it. It is not a story of survival, but of continued surviving.
This story will make you reflect on yourself, and those you love, and strangers, and your interactions with all of them. It will make you examine all the institutions of which you are or have been a part of. You will either become a different and better person after reading this story, or you will have missed the point.
Great book!
It would've been better if it didn't end on the stereotypical "and then I got married and had a kid, now everything's so nice"