No Guts, No Story: A Tale of Courage and Success from the Heartland Book

I very much enjoyed this, in no small part because it hit my own experience so squarely--raised Southern Baptist but clearly destined from an early age for another spiritual path, writer, animal and nature lover. Peterson writes well and tells a good story. I appreciated her insights about being "liberal" in a evangelical family (like Peterson's, mine is not fundamentalist), and the comparisons between End Times believers and environmental doomsayers. Nicely done memoir I would recommend to the right person.

I will also attach here the review I wrote for the UU World magazine:

A "green-diaper baby," Brenda Peterson fell in love with primeval forests and especially wildlife at a young age. Her family moved often, following her father's career with the U.S. Forest Service, which he headed in the 1980s.
Her own childhood career, she says, was the Southern Baptist church, with its "quasi-military marching songs, extravagant potlucks, and serious biblical scholarship made into children's games," which she excelled at. She was at church with her family every night. But her love of the earth and science was what really shaped her personal theology: that miracles were really natural events, that humans were simply another animal.
A Sunday School teacher's declaration that animals do not have an afterlife set off her crisis of faith: how was it "possible to love God and not forsake all his creatures…to love this earth and still long to leave it"?
I Want to Be Left Behind is a series of well-told stories of how Peterson wrestles with the conflicts between her conservative religious upbringing and her love of the earth, between the longings of her own soul and her love for her family. Her sharp wit makes the seriousness of her task always entertaining: "I promise not to be myself," she assures her brother before one family reunion. During a family debate over global warming, she thinks inwardly: "…whoever had invented the 'Reply to All' in e-mail should be shot. Being on the family distribution list is like having a virus of Fox News invade my in-box."
She turns her scrutiny on both her chosen world of liberal values and her family's religious beliefs'finding fault and virtue in both, as well as common ground.
For five years after college, Peterson lived in New York City, rubbing shoulders with the literati, while writing her first novel about snake-handling believers. Her evangelical powerhouse of a mother came by train to pay a visit, determined to find her backslid daughter a church. Find one she did'the Southern Baptist Church in Harlem. Decked out in a pink veiled hat and heels, her mother chatted up the elderly deacon about their Southern "roots," to the mortification of her daughter, warily checking out the other congregants. As the roaring preacher quoted Martin Luther King, Langston Hughes, and First John's message of "God is love," and the organist rocked old Baptist gospel standards, both women couldn't help but join in with gusto.
Peterson grasped then that her mother just might be less racist and more open-hearted than she was herself, always armed with mace in her purse. Throughout the book, she considers whether belief in the Rapture may be one response, perhaps even a genetically wired one, to fears bigger than we can handle.
Frustrated by "conservationists who were sometimes as hardline and self-righteous as Southern Baptists," she drew up a chart of traits she found on both sides: "Enraptured by doom…Thou shalt not…Holier than Thou…humorless…blame, shame, judgment" and so on. "What if both camps simply stopped all their fearmongering and found a new story?" she asks. "We might imagine a future in which all species flourish, along with us."
Peterson is at her most inspiring when she writes about her own rapturous encounters with wildlife. She is part of a community seal-sitting project on Seattle's Alki Beach: 100 neighbors trained by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to watch over seal pups while their mothers hunt for up to 48 hours at a time. In the touching prologue, a fellow seal sitter offers her a will to inherit his worldly possessions when the Rapture comes. Watching the tides, seabirds, and baby seals, she confesses to him what I know is not easy for a Southern Baptist girl: "I really want to be left behind."
A shadow has been cast over Peterson's memoir by her sister Marla, who has alleged that many of the personal and family stories have been embellished or made up, wherever the book is reviewed online.
Memoirists always risk offending family and friends, and exposing how they've misremembered, reconciled their pain, and embellished their stories, unconsciously or not. That is the central problem for this burgeoning genre. Memoir is memory, not fact, even though it's classified as nonfiction. I have been repeatedly baffled, especially by family members who hold a different religious or political world-view, at how we remember incidents that I considered pivotal in my life in factually opposite ways'just as I am mystified that we could have come from the same background.
Many of the facts in question are a case of she said/she said. I have no trouble believing Peterson may have inflated her highly entertaining stories. Yet her telling of the journey of her life, and the lessons learned negotiating her way as a liberal in a conservative religious family, ring completely true.