Don’t Call It A Cult by Sarah Berman (journalist’s reports of various women who have escaped NXIVM and their experiences in the cult) The toys and games section is an interesting curio since many survived in one form or another into the 80's and the sweets section is quite interesting too. I distinctively remember the candy cigarettes with the red tip to mirror a real cigarette. And yes, us kids did pretend to smoke them, preparing for adult hood. In the tradition of Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman, Escape by Carolyn Jessop, and Troublemaker by Leah Remini

This tell-all follows Sarah from the moment she takes her first NXIVM seminar, to the invitation she accepts from her best friend, Lauren Salzman, into DOS, to her journey toward become a key witness in the federal case against its founders

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TV takes up nearly half the book, such is the rich vein of brilliance to be mined. Because it wasn’t only kid’s TV that put the willies up the nation, adults were treated to such downbeat fare as Callan, Play For Today, Gangsters and all those peculiarly British dystopias such as Doomwatch, Survivors and Quatermass. No wonder it was a troubled decade. We were basically being told the future was rubbish! But in amongst all this there was some gloriously low budget, but highly imaginative, prime time Sci-Fi to be had as well. UFO, Space 1999 and Blake’s 7 to name but a few. Plus there’s a whole section devoted to Doctor Who (of course!) I also learnt that 'Joe Hawkins' from 'The Oppressed' song 'King of the Skins' was based on a book character and have gone out and bought those from the series in print. Suspect I will either love or hate them...Every day is a school day) Although I’m reading a lot of stuff about NXIVM, this will probably be the only review I post so I’m including further reading that I am doing in case you want to embark on this little obsession with me.

Prince Tristan Faasa was never destined for the throne. That was always his brother, Michael. The same brother responsible for both Tristan's tormented childhood and the scar that mars his face. When their father dies, Michael is set to assume the throne, and Tristan is set to steal it. The leader of a secret rebellion, Tristan will stop at nothing to end his brother's reign. But when Michael's new betrothed, Lady Sara Beatreaux arrives, Tristan finds himself in the middle of a new kind of war. The kind that begs the question of what's more important, the crown or the woman about to wear it. To be a child is to live in a state of fear most of the time. The fear of being lost, of being bullied, of making your parents angry, of being told off, of getting into trouble at school. This sense of dread can be amplified by the media/popular culture around them. There are the things that you know are meant to be scary, the things that are more scary than you thought they would be and the things that are scary that you didn’t think would be. La voz y fuerza que tuvo Sarah para cuestionar y poder salir de ese agujero fue admirable y su testimonio es resistencia y resiliencia para comprender, cuestionar y aprender. This book was not a particularly easy read, in a large part for me due to how it was written. I found the CBC investigative journal program Uncover: Exposing NXIVM to be a much more entertaining dig into Sarah Edmondson's experience and easier to digest. I have yet to read Oxenberg's book on it all, but I am looking forward to eventually doing so. The section Scarred By Public Information Films is a wonderland of innocence and injury: individual ads and films are discussed, and it’s to the authors’ credit that they can demonstrate how the hysterical and laughable nature of many of these mini-horror movies sits happily cheek-by-jowl with a very real, completely unforgettable sense of sweaty unease and existential panic: the title of one sub-chapter, Everything Kills is perfect: in the world of the PIF, a rug on a polished wooden floor could be scarier than any chainsaw. The book is studded throughout with a running roll-call of unsung heroes of British cultural life, and in this section the career of the late, great John Krish (of notorious Nationwide-bothering railway-safety film The Finishing Line, and bleak, brutal fire-prevention short Searching) gets a thorough evaluation. The chapter’s real coup is an interview with Jeff Grant, director of the authentically haunting Lonely Water, the Citizen Kane of Public Information Films. The connections he makes between the grim, fatalistic tone of his 90-second classic and the monochrome dread of Ingmar Bergman is catnip to the ageing PIF-lover.

Overview

The book begins by looking at children’s television dramas, starting with the ITV serial Noah’s Castle, which dealt with food shortages and society breaking down in the face of civil unrest. Though adapted from a 70s novel, this was broadcast in the 80s, as if to mark the idea – at the start of the decade – that the discord in the world was here and not going away. Serials like The Tripods and The Knights of God dealt with young heroes fighting against controlling totalitarian regimes, showing that this has been a theme in young adult fiction for longer than commonly assumed. As we get older, the things that scared us originally begin to lose some of their power. Often they get replaced by other, more logical fears as we learn more about how the world works and understand how unlikely it is that Dracula will crawl out from under our bed and exsanguinate us while we're asleep. But the point is, there were dozens, potentially hundreds, of things that scared us, creeped us out, and gave us nightmares. And no matter how mature we think we are, no matter how grown up we get and how many years we put between us and those nightmares, they still linger down there in the depths of our subconscious, waiting to be recalled. You can tell this book was quite the labor of love for the two men. A lot of work went into researching, writing, and in some cases even interviewing people for the finished product. Brotherstone and Lawrence focus as much on historical information and contextualizing as they do on the scary/creepy/weird, and most every section ends with suggestions of where to go to find the particular film, board game, comic, television show, book, or whatnot should you want to experience it for yourself. This confused author makes all sorts of bad life decisions, then blames the people she trusted in. While what those leaders did was eventually deemed illegal, it's also tough to feel sympathy for her because at any point over 12 years she could have walked away. But until she was branded she didn't. Pirating from all sorts of existing philosophies including Scientology, The Four Agreements, Dianetics, the martial arts system of growth, and ultimately components of Hinduism and the Klu Klux Klan, Keith Raniere developed a complex university of human potential. Most of the concepts are actually pretty stellar ideas—credit to the people who originally devised them—and had NXIVM continued in a direction for good, it could have done some pretty great things, much like Hitler, but we all know how that story ends.

Nostalgia seems to define and dictate our present culture, perhaps as it never has before, in ways undreamt-of as recently as a decade ago. Ever since our ability to record, edit and re-share the visual and sonic textures of our common (and sometimes uncommon) cultural experience became a viable option to those outside the entertainment industry, people (largely, it has to be said, bespectacled introverts with testicles and optional BO) have been doing so. First by exchanging physical objects with one another in the playground: physical objects like last night’s John Peel Show or that (“Honest to God it IS!”) snuff movie we got a loan of off our dodgy cousin in the next school along. Recorded onto magnetic tape and somehow both comically bulky to the eyes of today’s Netflix-and-Spotify-reared generation and simultaneously fragile, flimsy, as delicate as a butterfly’s wing. As digital files and the internet gradually came to replace pretty much every aspect of our day-to-day entertainment and social requirements the exchange now happens invisibly, across thousands of miles of fibre-optic cabling and through the phantom miracle of wi-fi. There was a strong Gothic element to British TV output as well, with annual Ghost stories for Christmas (usually an MR James adaptation) and such downright strange shows as Dead of Night, The Stone Tape and Sapphire and Steel. All of this is recalled in loving detail by the authors along with recommendations of what to watch and how to watch (either DVD or YouTube. Thank god for YouTube!). La forma tan intima y respetuosa que tiene Sarah de contar su historia hace que este libro no se vuelva tan pesado, si bien el tema es delicado, Sarah lo sabe llevar muy bien sin caer en el morbo, lo único que deseas es justicia. Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.”

Well. What a crazy world this is. I had read some news articles a few years ago about someone supposedly known from TV, an actrice helped this man and they were in a cult. Most of the book is deadly dull as she details every step of her naive journey. The final chapters, as she tries to leave the group after she is branded, are the most interesting. But the fact that it took her agreeing to be branded to finally see the light means that there was something seriously wrong with her beyond the Nexium group. And she had many chances to walk away from it--instead she succumbed to more peer pressure and placed herself on the table.

I didn't know much about NXIVM until I read this book. I was surprised to learn how many men were a part of this cult, because the news coverage described it as a sex cult with famous actresses involved. More information is available now, including the documentary, "The Vow" (at this point I've only seen the first episode).

Edmondson was in NXIVM for years, slowly working her way up the ranks when one day her best friend, who was one of the highest-ranking people in the organization, asked her to be in a secret club where Sarah would be the slave and she would be the master. She sold it to her as a group of women helping other women grow and develop. However, it soon became clear that wasn’t the case. The “slaves” were actually being groomed to be sex slaves for NXIVM’s leader. With everything involved in NXIVM over the course of the years, the key players, Sarah Edmonson being one, I have been completely fascinated by everything that continues to be revealed about this secret organization. Sarah’s account is thorough—you will learn a lot about the philosophies, vocabulary, rules, and rituals. You get her version of events right up until she was branded to be in DOS, the secret women’s group being groomed to become sexual partners for Raniere, along with her escape from the organization and attempts to save all of those she had recruited.