The Sacramento News & Review Saving souls, losing kids By Kel Munger Have You Seen My Mother Bryan Lee McGlothin Taurleo ...religious fervor combines with unimaginable cruelty to weave a fabric of lies and half-truths of Bryan Lee McGlothin’s childhood--all the more ironic because his father claims to have stolen him away from his “demonized” mother to raise him “in the Truth.” (Reminder: Be wary of anyone who describes his or her beliefs as “the Truth” with a definite article and a capital “T.”) McGlothin’s father tells him that his mother abandoned him and, later, that she died. Finally, in his 30s, McGlothin takes it upon himself to investigate; he discovers that his father kidnapped him from his mother’s custody and hid him for years, with the cooperation of members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a church in which his father was an elder. Have You Seen My Mother? makes up in pure sentiment what it lacks in sophisticated writing. McGlothin’s reunion with his mother, now brain-damaged from a failed suicide attempt made when she despaired of ever seeing her son again, will leave all but the most hard-hearted reader wiping away tears. His story makes an excellent case for the aggressive enforcement of child-custody orders and parental-kidnap laws. What both memoirs have in common are their raw and literate accounts of the terrors inflicted on children whose parents see them as property rather than as people. Like the Rev. James Dobson, who advocates breaking the will of children through the use of corporal punishment--beginning as young as 15 months, mind you--the parents in these memoirs claim that their overriding motive is concern for their children’s spiritual lives. The reality of their children’s shattered spirits tells another story, and it’s one worth reading. The Sacramento News & Review