My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes

specialfred 3 hours ago|

[flagged]

pcblues 7 hours ago||

Looks like she is still trying to make money. So the cult didn't work out. I left a cult. If she wants to use the word for sympathy, talk about the really bad ones. Start with Nebraska and work back from there. Sympathy farmer.

swatcoder 8 hours ago|

I'm sure these are all entertaining and engaging and reveal some exciting insider details, but it's worth keeping in mind that memoirs like these are closer to fiction than most things we think of as "nonfiction".

They're individual testimonies, often nearly impossible to verify, and written in an era where "autofiction" and "creative non-fiction" are mature commercial genres with their own tropes, standards, forms, and conceits.

If you're intellectually curious about "cults, scams, and schemes", there's a whole other -- drier but more earnest -- world of nonfiction to be found in places like JSTOR or the catalogs of academic presses.

ktallett 8 hours ago|

As an academic, I wouldn't like to state papers are any different in regards to reliability of sources. They will just be testimonies and author viewpoint.

swatcoder 8 hours ago||

Well, there's certainly no objectivity in academic sociology or history, but there's a culture of trying to build narratives and justify viewpoints through richer collections of evidence: multiple testimonies, contemporaneous records and primary ephemera, prior publications, etc

In contrast, memoir is often simply held to the standard of "is there strong and ready evidence against this claim, or can it at least hold up as the author's subjective interpretation of some event" because it's purpose and history as a genre is entirely different. Its audiences aren't academic peers hungry for material against which they can safely anchor their own work, but tens of thousands of airplane readers who are hungry for titillation or personal relatability.