| Escape | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 307 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1749
Category: Book
Authors: Carolyn Jessop, Laura Palmer
Publisher: Broadway
Studio: Broadway
Manufacturer: Broadway
Label: Broadway
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 0767927567
Dewey Decimal Number: 289.3092
EAN: 9780767927567
ASIN: 0767927567
Publication Date: October 16, 2007
Release Date: October 16, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman?s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.
When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn?s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband?s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.
Carolyn?s every move was dictated by her husband?s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse?at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife?s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.
Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop?s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 302 more reviews...
 Riveting, Horrifying, but Not Well-Written October 8, 2008
I recommend the book for it's content, not it's style--the writing is pretty awful, most notably for it's frustrating redundancies and lapses.
Preconceived notions you have about the quaint, if misogynistic, polygamists of the FLDS church may be turned on their heads when you learn first-hand what it's like for women and children who are literally trapped in a community, committed to living lives they have little control or influence over.
 Great Book and it arrive in Excellent Condition October 7, 2008
Love the book, I haven't got all the way through it, but it's hard to put down. Well written and real.
 Amazing story --- Horrendous writing. October 6, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Polygamy fascinates me, so I didn't hesitate to pick up this book. To quote the cover: "I was born into a radical polygamist cult. At eighteen, I becme the fourth wife of a fifty-year-old man. I had eight children in fifteen years. When our leader began to preach the apocalypse, I knew I had to get them out." This book is mostly an autobiography, but it's an alert about the inner workings of the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the shocking and often news-worthy side of the Mormon Church).
The preface details the night of her escape, but chapter one begins with her birth. The author tells of her relatively normal, though somewhat abusive childhood; how she raised in a "royal" family of FLDS and taught religion from her very first breath, always aware of her priviledged position on Earth. Chronologically she records her life, her marriage into an extremely disfunctional family and the power struggles within her house and her community. As her life became more restricted and the rules of her religion more extreme, she felt the need to escape and devised a plan to do so. The book continues through their assimilation to life outside the cult, how she obtained full custody of her children (According to FLDS law, mothers have no right to their children, but bear them only as gifts to their husbands and as paths to salvation for themselves.), and how she finally found love.
Introduction over. I didn't finish the book. After 235 pages I had had enough. The book covers a very interesting subject and an amazing story, but the writing is just awful. I felt like I was reading an 8th-grade book report. It was a facts-based, unemotional retelling of what happened. "We went here. I said this. He said this. We had sex." The author seems completely unattached. What's worse is she fills the historical account with modern commentary, telling us why what so-and-so did was wrong or how this event that happened then contradicts her expectations now. The memoir is filled with contempt. Rather than a victor's story of "I am stronger because of what I survived," this story is a bitter victim's tale of "I'm better than my past and I never should have gone through this." I consent she has reason to feel this way, but her story would have been so much more effective if she had offered a personal, but objective view instead of telling the readers what to think.
Final Thoughts: I'm going to keep looking. I want to learn more about the topic, but am thoroughly disappointed with this book. There has to be a better one available.
 Should be in FICTION October 4, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Apparently the author put together a conglomeration of hallucination, exaggeration, retaliation, and called it ESCAPE. From what? Why? Perhaps it gets more sales (don't buy it). There are too many conflicting stories and tales which led me to say it should be in fiction.
Hell on earth or hell in the hearafter, or both. September 28, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book provides a graphic documentation of how tyranny, masquerading as religion, can create some of the most pathological societies imaginable, defeating laws and mores that prohibit simultaneous polygyny, slavery, extreme physical and mental child and wife abuse, arranged marriages, nepotism and cronyism, among other abuses. Through a combination of incessant brainwashing and bullying, a few old men run the lives of everyone in these communities of FLDS(Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints), in which women and children are considered and treated like mere chattel. Children are considered inherently devilish, thus justifying constant physical and emotional abuse to beat obedience into them. Women have virtually no say in whom they marry, most being married to men 2,3 or 4X their age and forced to remain pregnant for most of their reproductive lives. Thus, the long term domination strategy of this cult is to outreproduce the rest of the world, aided by occasional God-induced holocausts that spare them. The hypocritical leaders try to enlist state and federal financial support for their huge families by claiming they aren't actually married to these women, when it is convenient to do so. If women attempt to escape this cult, they are hunted down like escaped slaves. Nontheless, a few do attempt, and a very few succeed in escaping. The author's sister did escape before being forced to marry an old man, but was forced to marry a young man she did not love who helped her retain her freedom against great odds. This experience dissuaded the author from making a similar attempt until 15 years after her forced marriage to a powerful psychopathic older man, emboldened by her mother's escape a few days earlier. It was only the ascension of an extremely tyrannical man to the position of chief prophet(and profit), and the ever escalating demonstration that her husband had no regard for her except as a baby-making machine, that induced these 2 women, as well as others, to try to escape this cult, knowing they would be severely punished if they failed.
A few reviewers have complained about poor writing and editing, boringly repetitive stories, contradictory statements and too many people to keep track of. Well, with umpteen competing wives per man and umpteen children per wife, the latter criticism is hard to avoid. If the other criticisms have some validity, I did not find them noticable and they were more than outweighed by the nitty gritty description of the deplorable psychological conditions in this pathologically xenophobic community and by the description of how the author's escape finally brought national exposure to the insanities that ruled this community and which began the unraveling of the hold of the power elite over this community.
One of the most memorable revelations was the incident involving the sadistic elementary school principal who heard the commotion from a teacher-sanctioned party in a room. Without even consulting the teacher, he began kicking and otherwise brutalizing the children. The teacher was too cowed to explain the situation. Because of his family connections, this principal retained his position despite strong protests from the parents. Another of the unbelievable stories was the reponses to the 9/11 attacks and the later Southeast Asia tsunami. These were cheered as the beginning of an attack by God on the wicked of the world(everyone not a member of FLDS), which would ultimately result in the destructiuon of everyone except FLDS members.
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