Reviews tagging 'Suicide attempt'

Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties by Deborah Herman

1 review

librarymouse's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

3.5

This book has killed my desire to know more about cults. It was an upsetting read, but I think I'm glad to have read it. I almost put this book down and completely stopped reading it in the first quarter. When describing her early life, Dianne describes her early childhood sexual assault with a positive spin that was viscerally upsetting to read. As I got further into the book, I realized that description fits the severity of the incident when compared to Dianne's experiences in her teens. The writing feels a bit academic in the beginning, but once I got into the book, I found that the narration described Manson and the family's descent into extremist madness that was thorough, yet easily consumable. Manson's carefully created magnetism and Dianne's curious, rose-colored memories of the events of her early time with the Manson family explain just how impressionable young people were twisted so deeply.
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