Here are 100 books that Combating Cult Mind Control fans have personally recommended if you like
Combating Cult Mind Control.
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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the hidden histories of everyday things, especially in media and popular culture. (Who were those people on TV laugh tracks? Where did Muzak records come from?) A career in broadcasting only sharpened this interest, informing two decades of writing and performing.
That this book even exists is amazing. By the end, it seems less like an exposé than an all-in wager on the power of truth. The final few chapters alone are worth the price of admission, and while Alex Gibney's documentary of the same name is well worth watching, Lawrence Wright's book is—for now, and perhaps for all time—the definitive look at a secretive world.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower comes “an utterly necessary story” (The Wall Street Journal) that pulls back the curtain on the church of Scientology: one of the most secretive organizations at work today. • The Basis for the HBO Documentary.
Scientology presents itself as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment, but its practices have long been shrouded in mystery. Now Lawrence Wright—armed with his investigative talents, years of archival research, and more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—uncovers…
As a young man, I wanted to do good. And I believed the best way to do that was to increase the commitment I’d made to my faith. So, I joined a church that appeared genuine. But much to my shock, not everything was as it seemed—I’d fallen into a cult. Deception, authoritarianism, and hypocrisy abounded. This led me on a decades-long search for answers: How could leaders do this? Why would members stay loyal? What could be done about it? I eventually found my answers and began doing what I’d always wanted to do—help others. I did it by becoming a journalist/author specializing in religion.
One of the most important investigations of America’s far-right White Supremacist movement. This highly informative volume, which I used while doing my own research of the movement for various projects, is based primarily on the actual words/views voiced by White supremacists with whom the author lived for many months. Fascinating and disturbing.
"Ezekiel's pointed volume is the best available modern source for grasping the psychological foundations of the Radical Right."-Thomas F Pettigrew, Univ. of Cal., Santa Cruz.
As a young man, I wanted to do good. And I believed the best way to do that was to increase the commitment I’d made to my faith. So, I joined a church that appeared genuine. But much to my shock, not everything was as it seemed—I’d fallen into a cult. Deception, authoritarianism, and hypocrisy abounded. This led me on a decades-long search for answers: How could leaders do this? Why would members stay loyal? What could be done about it? I eventually found my answers and began doing what I’d always wanted to do—help others. I did it by becoming a journalist/author specializing in religion.
From an evangelical Christian perspective, this reference work covers a wide range of topics via short, easy-to-understand, fact-based, and information-packed essays that range from just a paragraph to several pages. It’s an excellent research tool to which I contributed several essays. Some of the best researchers, scholars, and experts in the field of world religions were part of the large editorial team that produced this benchmark work.
With all of the different religions, sects, denominations, and belief systems out there, it can be difficult to separate the facts from mere opinion, especially if one is relying solely on online sources which may or may not be vetted and which often have an ideological or political slant to them. How can we truly understand if we cannot even be sure we are getting the facts straight?
In this comprehensive resource, more than 75 evangelical scholars offer a thoroughly researched guide to Christianity, other world religions, and alternative religious views, including entries on movements, theological terms, and major historical…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I knew I wanted to be a writer of fiction when I was 10 years old, being raised by my father. He thoughtfully gave me a typewriter, and plenty of other encouragement too. As a youngster, I couldn’t read enough about what youngsters read about: animals, sports, cowboys, child detectives. Soon, I came to love books that probed human conflict through characters who reached deeply into my soul. Not simplistic “good versus evil” driven principally by plot, but gut-pulling interpersonal struggle coming to life (and sometimes death) in characters facing moral and legal dilemma, and facing it with wit, humor, and human frailty.
I was blown away by the authentic voices of the characters, the quick pacing, and the theme of justice confronting racial hatred in a courthouse and a community. Something tells me that Grisham himself might be most proud of this first novel, even over his many fine ones that followed it. Recently, I went back to read some of this book.
I wanted to remember how Grisham wrote about place and atmosphere. I found myself sweating as I took in his words describing the hot southern town. I re-read the entire novel.
______________________________ THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLER
John Grisham's first and most shocking novel, adapted as a film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey
When Carl Lee Hailey guns down the violent racists who raped his ten-year-old daughter, the people of the small town of Clanton, Mississippi see it as justice done, and call for his acquittal.
But when extremists outside Clanton - including the KKK - hear that a black man has killed two white men, they invade the town, determined to destroy anything and anyone that opposes their sense of justice. A national media circus descends on Clanton.
I began reading about religion, cults, and “high demand” groups to help me understand the group I was writing about in The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune. In my book, the central question was how could so many smart, highly educated people allow their lives to be taken over by a group of psychotherapists. As a result, it was crucial for me to understand what draws people into new religions and holds them in groups that others may consider extreme or bizarre.
For a theoretical and psychological understanding of the workings of cults, I would strongly recommend the work of Robert Jay Lifton, in particular, his most recent book Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealoutry, which brings together many of his writings over the years on the subject of cults and what he called “totalizing” groups, ones which demand absolute commitment.
Lifton, who wrote about “Nazi Doctors," the Chinese cultural revolution, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, which carried out a deadly sarin attack on a Tokyo subway in 1987, grasped that the mechanism of belief and allegiance that bind both political and religious movements are essentially the same.
Lifton worked out eight criteria for thought control that groups commonly used that went from “Milieu Control,” (isolating members and control the information they are exposed to) and “Demand for Purity” (in which the good…
Robert Jay Lifton, the National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual, proposes a radical idea: that the psychological relationship between extremist political movements and fanatical religious cults may be much closer than anyone thought. Exploring the most extreme manifestations of human zealotry, Lifton highlights an array of leaders - from Mao to Hitler to the Japanese apocalyptic cult leader Shoko Asahara to Donald Trump - who have sought the control of human minds and the ownership of reality.
I don’t think I’m alone in considering cults and those who join cults fascinating, but I’ve also always found it frustrating when non-fiction accounts or documentaries focus on the logistics of how the communes operate rather than finding out the why. Why do people join a cult, why do they stay, why do they follow increasingly erratic and dangerous instruction? For me, researching cults for my new novel The Sleepless – about a commune whose disciples believe that sleep is a social construct – was about finding out about the characters, the individuals, who are drawn into organisations which often ask you to relinquish that self-same sense of individuality.
This novel reimagines the events of the Jonestown massacre with lushly beautiful prose and a magical realist twist that offers the possibility of escape and redemption from the most horrific circumstances.
It’s a wonderfully immersive story that sucks you in with sensory detail and a hope-against-hope that the main characters won’t “drink the Kool-Aid”. One of those books where you need to sit still and catch your breath after turning the last page…
Acclaimed novelist, playwright, and poet Fred D’Aguiar has been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize in poetry for Bill of Rights, his narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre, and won the Whitbread First Novel Award for The Longest Memory. In this beautifully imagined work of literary fiction, he returns to the territory of Jim Jones’s utopian commune, interweaving magical realism and shocking history into a resonant story of love, faith, oppression, and sacrifice in which a mother and daughter attempt to break free with the help of an extraordinary gorilla.
Joyce and her young daughter, Trina, are members of a…
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster…
I taught English and creative writing for 37 years in San Francisco, California. In 2018, Ron Cabral and I published And Then They Were Gone, which tells the story of the People’s Temple teenagers we taught. Many of them never returned after the Jonestown massacre and died there. We hope this story about our young students—their hopes, their poetry, their efforts to help make a better world—will bring some light to the dark story of Jonestown.
Raven is the best, most comprehensive, and most thoroughly researched book on Jim Jones, Jonestown, and Peoples Temple. Reiterman is a fine investigative journalist who was part of a group to visit Jonestown, Guyana in November of 1978. The visitors included, among others, eight members of the press; Congressman Leo Ryan and his aide Jackie Speier; and thirteen representatives of the “Concerned Relatives,” their own name for the group. Every member of the group had defected from the Temple in San Francisco. Only some of these visitors—Reiterman and a few of the other journalists, Ryan and Speier, and a small number of the group of relatives—were finally and reluctantly admitted in by Jones, on the stern advice of Jones’s lawyers. The Concerned Relatives were there to see if—as they strongly suspected—those in Jonestown were being held against their will. The journalists wanted to find the truth about life in the…
The basis for the upcoming HBO miniseries and the "definitive account of the Jonestown massacre" (Rolling Stone) -- now available for the first time in paperback.
Tim Reiterman’s Raven provides the seminal history of the Rev. Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and the murderous ordeal at Jonestown in 1978.
This PEN Award–winning work explores the ideals-gone-wrong, the intrigue, and the grim realities behind the Peoples Temple and its implosion in the jungle of South America. Reiterman’s reportage clarifies enduring misperceptions of the character and motives of Jim Jones, the reasons why people followed him, and the important truth that many…
People sometimes say that the purpose of anthropology is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I think the same about history. As these books demonstrate, apparently normal early Americans have complex and unique inner lives, while those who seem bizarre, remote, or august, in fact, have wholly relatable human experiences. I usually write about complicated systems, like insurance and law. But I cherish these books about outcasts, oddballs, and one-of-a-kinds. They remind me that our society comprises individuals whose life experiences, worldviews, and decisions are unique—and ultimately unpredictable. Whenever I write, I try to remember that.
New York in the 1830s was a modern city on the make, where you could find Irish immigrant neighborhoods, white-collar workers, fire insurance, social reformers...and the bizarre religious cult of the Prophet Matthias.
I find Matthias reactionary and creepy, but I am fascinated by how he sees modern life through a dark mirror. His loathing of the rising middle-class world was so specific! He hated new-fangled cast-iron stoves, "women who do not keep at home," and "men who wear spectacles." Johnson and Wilentz refuse to spell out all the lessons of this book; instead, they dump you into a strange environment where the most unsettling moments are actually the ones when something suddenly feels familiar.
Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz brilliantly recapture the forgotten story of Matthias the Prophet, imbuing their richly researched account with the dramatic force of a novel. In the hands of Johnson and Wilentz, the strange tale of Matthias opens a fascinating window into the turbulent movements of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening--movements that swept up great numbers of evangelical Americans and gave rise to new sects like the Mormons. Into this teeming environment walked a down-and-out carpenter named Robert Matthews, who announced himself as Matthias, prophet of the God of the Jews. His hypnotic personality drew…
I’ve been reading and writing horror for more than forty years and am prolific in both aspects. Show me a book with a tentacle and I’ll show you my newest purchase.
Release the Kraken! While the tentacles might be more subtle on newer editions of this fine book, the title alone is enough to get it added to my list. This is a classic and the twists and turns in it are stupendous. What hooked me from the beginning was the characters and the story arc, although the plot, setting, and everything else make this a book you cannot miss. A must-read.
Winner of the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, Kraken is a darkly comic, wildly absurd adventure by author of Perdido Street Station, China Mieville.
Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?
For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature…
We all want peace. We all want a life of joy and meaning. We want to feel blissfully comfortable in our own skin, moving through the world with grace and ease. But how many of us are actively taking the steps to create such a life?
I spent 7 years in a commercial cult. I was indoctrinated into, rose to the top of, and finally escaped from a multilevel marketing company. When I started my exit, I wondered how I had become so brainwashed, which led me to do research into coercive control. I started to understand that different types of authoritarian control; behavior, information, thought, and emotional, drove me further into the cult and away from my outside friends and family. I read as many cult books and watched as many documentaries as I could find, and became fascinated with uncovering why people find themselves in the same situation I was in.
Once again I became interested in a book thanks to a documentary!
When I watched the documentary about Sarah Lawrence College, I wanted to know more. Daniel Barban Levin’s story really demonstrates how a fragile young mind can be influenced by someone with sinister intentions.
He vividly describes his time spent with a manipulative cult leader (Larry Ray), and his narrative disturbingly shows us just how easily something like this could've happened to us. Very sadly relatable, for people who lose their voice when they fall victim to gaslighting or abusive friends, mentors, or partners.
An “extraordinary” (Nylon) firsthand account of the creation of a modern cult and the costs paid by its young victims: a group of college roommates
“Intense . . . [a tale] of hard-won survival, and creating a life after the unimaginable.”—Salon
The inspiration for the Hulu docuseries Stolen Youth, directed by Zach Heinzerling and co-produced by Daniel Barban Levin
In September 2010, at the beginning of the academic year at Sarah Lawrence College, a sophomore named Talia Ray asked her roommates if her father could stay with them for a while. No one objected. Her father, Larry Ray, was just…
