SOURCE: “False Comforters,” in Ms., Vol. 7, No. 4, October, 1978, pp. 43–5.

In the following laudatory assessment of Visions of Glory, Stimpson asserts that the study is “more than a modern confession; more than a lucid, often brilliant, first-person account of doubt and belief.”

Visions of Glory is a brave, enormous, painful book. As she exorcises the past, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison asks, “What does it mean to believe in God?,” a question that embarrasses many, but enthralls some.

When she was nine, Barbara Grizzuti and her mother became converts to the Jehovah's Witnesses. An ardent member of that “fundamentalist, apocalyptic, prophetic” religion, she “preached sweet doom” from door to door. After high school, she lived for several years at the Witnesses' central headquarters in Brooklyn. Yet fervor and faith were insufficient. Passionate, intelligent, she could not suppress her curiosity, her doubts, and her rebellion against a Jehovah who would condemn decent...