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two book reviews today ~
the most flattering way i can describe this is halfway between a decent medium article and a decent book.
there's a lot of cool factoids like this security company founded by a sect of western sikhs who may or may not have some skeletons in the closet, stuff on jonestowns' anti-racist and amazingly progreessive start before it all went to shit and jim jones lost his marbles, etc. this was also surprisingly even handed considering the author's father was in synanon (famous abusive cult); it doesn't immediately go for the 'every quirky org is eeeevil' shtick and basically focuses on various organization's actions - do they have recordable abusive actions where they excommunicate folks, have they caused deaths, etc.
that said the overall tone is a little. twitter-user-y for my tastes.
there's tells that's as mild as 'the chillest (x) around' which imo belongs in a blog post not a book lol, this may just be me being an old fart. the stuff that really grinded my gears is lot of the writing feels like she's trying to write specifically for progressives in her twitter sphere such as blaming a chunk of cult conversion thinking on how society is trained to listen to straight white men ..... when not 10 pages before/after she talks specifically how jim jones studied black pastors, talks about this crystals and yoga lady caused cult like suicides, the sikh sect above. im like, lady, .... literally, straight white men don't have a monopoly of being charismatic even in your book, lol. please stop blaming them and trump every five seconds as it really dates this book, and actually hinders your point.
anyway, there's some decent points in here about the language - how language craftily used is even way more effective than isolation and the other "standard" methods most people have heard about cults like shame -- how simply by getting folks in a group to repeat the same phrase over and over again in a ritualistic setting, it already starts that sort of bonding to a different in-group. this book is strongest when focusing on the science there, how most cult researchers hate the word 'brainwashing' because it's a thought-ending cliche.
that said, all in all i'm remembered why i agree with apenwarr that the best books tend to be 30+ years old at minimum (survived the test of time). would not recommend unless if you're specifically looking for this sort of quirky, snack sized twitter friendly primer on cults. (meanwhile i'm starting to realize if a book isn't on archive.org which has all the classics, i'm not interested lol)
(free to read on archive.org) also heads up for holocaust talk, given what it's about.
i got this one on a whim as research for a project, and never got around to reading it in time (honestly glad i didn't, the tone would have been wildly inappropriate). that said, Schindler's List is a heavy powerful movie that sits up high on my list of timeless classics you only want to see once. It's a well known WW2/Holocaust film about Schindler, a German who grew from apathy into rebelling against the Nazis, and saved countless Jewish generations with his bravery in cunning.
This is one of those books i'm glad I'm off of goodreads and no longer rating on a simple 1-5 scale because, this is .... a needful thing, it's cool in terms of it being a diary of this guy who has a lot of family history all wrapped up in the holocaust/events of the main story, and you find that most of the extras were Jewish folks with much the same history. They wanted to have a hand in this film, as they could sense that it was something respectful. you also had a decent amount of interesting anecdotes about Spielberg (main director/guy) researching beforehand and being moved with his own heritage and standing in the threshold of one of the gas chambers with Torah script written on it and just, powerful stuff.
there's some other anecdotes about choosing a filming location in poland, about Ralph Finnes (the face for Amon, the main bad guy being the camp commander) accidentally being so intimidating and so true to acting that a few of the other actors flinched a few times. there was a neat little interview segment at the end with Spielberg, when he talked about somebody his mom invited to a dinner party while he was a kid showing him a "magic trick" with turning a 6 to a 9 with an arm tattoo..... and Spielberg not realizing the uh, significance of the arm tattoo/barcode until he was grown. I wish there was more interview like segments - i always like hearing it directly from those folks.
This needed to be a book, but it's one of those that really can't be captured with numbers. it was not easy to read (the prose was, hm. not the selling point, let me put it that way), and it's best treated as a textual commentary companion to the movie rather than a standalone thing. it's meant to be that "yes, and-" extra, and rejoices in it - you have to be in the mindset to understand that as well.
the most flattering way i can describe this is halfway between a decent medium article and a decent book.
there's a lot of cool factoids like this security company founded by a sect of western sikhs who may or may not have some skeletons in the closet, stuff on jonestowns' anti-racist and amazingly progreessive start before it all went to shit and jim jones lost his marbles, etc. this was also surprisingly even handed considering the author's father was in synanon (famous abusive cult); it doesn't immediately go for the 'every quirky org is eeeevil' shtick and basically focuses on various organization's actions - do they have recordable abusive actions where they excommunicate folks, have they caused deaths, etc.
that said the overall tone is a little. twitter-user-y for my tastes.
there's tells that's as mild as 'the chillest (x) around' which imo belongs in a blog post not a book lol, this may just be me being an old fart. the stuff that really grinded my gears is lot of the writing feels like she's trying to write specifically for progressives in her twitter sphere such as blaming a chunk of cult conversion thinking on how society is trained to listen to straight white men ..... when not 10 pages before/after she talks specifically how jim jones studied black pastors, talks about this crystals and yoga lady caused cult like suicides, the sikh sect above. im like, lady, .... literally, straight white men don't have a monopoly of being charismatic even in your book, lol. please stop blaming them and trump every five seconds as it really dates this book, and actually hinders your point.
anyway, there's some decent points in here about the language - how language craftily used is even way more effective than isolation and the other "standard" methods most people have heard about cults like shame -- how simply by getting folks in a group to repeat the same phrase over and over again in a ritualistic setting, it already starts that sort of bonding to a different in-group. this book is strongest when focusing on the science there, how most cult researchers hate the word 'brainwashing' because it's a thought-ending cliche.
that said, all in all i'm remembered why i agree with apenwarr that the best books tend to be 30+ years old at minimum (survived the test of time). would not recommend unless if you're specifically looking for this sort of quirky, snack sized twitter friendly primer on cults. (meanwhile i'm starting to realize if a book isn't on archive.org which has all the classics, i'm not interested lol)
(free to read on archive.org) also heads up for holocaust talk, given what it's about.
i got this one on a whim as research for a project, and never got around to reading it in time (honestly glad i didn't, the tone would have been wildly inappropriate). that said, Schindler's List is a heavy powerful movie that sits up high on my list of timeless classics you only want to see once. It's a well known WW2/Holocaust film about Schindler, a German who grew from apathy into rebelling against the Nazis, and saved countless Jewish generations with his bravery in cunning.
This is one of those books i'm glad I'm off of goodreads and no longer rating on a simple 1-5 scale because, this is .... a needful thing, it's cool in terms of it being a diary of this guy who has a lot of family history all wrapped up in the holocaust/events of the main story, and you find that most of the extras were Jewish folks with much the same history. They wanted to have a hand in this film, as they could sense that it was something respectful. you also had a decent amount of interesting anecdotes about Spielberg (main director/guy) researching beforehand and being moved with his own heritage and standing in the threshold of one of the gas chambers with Torah script written on it and just, powerful stuff.
there's some other anecdotes about choosing a filming location in poland, about Ralph Finnes (the face for Amon, the main bad guy being the camp commander) accidentally being so intimidating and so true to acting that a few of the other actors flinched a few times. there was a neat little interview segment at the end with Spielberg, when he talked about somebody his mom invited to a dinner party while he was a kid showing him a "magic trick" with turning a 6 to a 9 with an arm tattoo..... and Spielberg not realizing the uh, significance of the arm tattoo/barcode until he was grown. I wish there was more interview like segments - i always like hearing it directly from those folks.
This needed to be a book, but it's one of those that really can't be captured with numbers. it was not easy to read (the prose was, hm. not the selling point, let me put it that way), and it's best treated as a textual commentary companion to the movie rather than a standalone thing. it's meant to be that "yes, and-" extra, and rejoices in it - you have to be in the mindset to understand that as well.
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