The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University Book

Ten years ago Rob Suskind's A Hope in the Unseen followed a poor, religious inner-city kid's struggles at Brown University. Now Brown U. is back with another hip-hop, flip-flop comedy. This time around, we get to see the hijinks of a Brown student going to a religious Southern school. And Kevin Roose manages to learn a lesson of tolerance and hard-fought understanding during the era of the culture war. Yay.

The problem is this book strikes me as incredibly cynical. In part, Roose as a narrator is both calculating and dishonest. He does this stunt explicitly to get a book deal, and it makes me question everything that happens. The narrative seems a bit too pat and marketable to not wonder how much of it has been manipulated. Besides, he spent all of his time at Liberty lying. I think the only reason we have to trust what he says now is his commitment as journalist, and as a 20-year-old who seems more concerned about launching a writing career, this assurance isn't enough.

The distrust deepens as it seems that he has excised large chunks of the real story, such as why best-selling author A.J. Jacobs apparently had to hire a college freshman as his research assistant on the trip to Liberty which began Kevin Roose's whole spiritual journey. My guess it that Roose's well-connected parents set him up with a well-connected author, the scheme for the book was hatched by Jacobs and a publisher, and Roose never writes nothing about it because he spends the majority of his pages carefully crafting the image of himself which he presents the reader. I guess the hours he spends on Facebook (his primary research tool) paid off with that skill.

That this book is best-seller material is somewhat depressing in itself. Roose jokingly compares his time at Liberty as just like spending a semester abroad, but in all honesty that's exactly what this book is in terms of his experiences and the intellectual depth with which he delves. Yet nobody would consider buying a novel of some sophomore's ramblings about Barcelona, but apparently we (the Northern liberal that this book is clearly targeted towards) think Southern Baptists as radically more foreign than anyone living outside our own borders.

The one really strong point of the book is its great pacing, usually a stumbling block for young authors. Maybe these Millennials, growing up on blogs and social networking, will be able to compensate for their lack of intellectual rigor with a great sense of pace. I look forward to an awesome future of rocking summer blockbusters. My suggestion: a pair of identical twins -- one gets sent to Rikers Island, the other matriculates to Brown, and then they HAVE TO SWITCH PLACES. Action-packed laffs for sure.