100 Books Like Going Clear

Like most Americans, I grew up hearing the codified version of the Charles Manson/Helter Skelter saga, so when I saw yet another Manson book, I had two thoughts: "This sounds like a cash-grab," and, "Ugh...it's probably some lunatic conspiracy theory."

Suffice it to say, I was wrong—dead wrong—on both counts. By now, there's a good chance you've heard the backstory to Tom O'Neill's book: how he came to write it, how long it took him to finish, and (most importantly) what he learned about the Manson case. If you don't know any of this, take my advice and go in blind. CHAOS will floor you.

I shouldn't be recommending this book. Its sources are limited. Its psychological approach to its subject is outdated. Worst of all, its author earned degrees in literature, not history! (I'm a history professor.) But I don't care.

I find this book electrifying. It is the work of a dogged gumshoe investigator, a mother in her 20s, who relentlessly dug up the long-concealed secrets of one of America's most extraordinary national stories: the life and death of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-Day Saints movement.

This book shows the most thrilling part of being a historian: finding things out. "No man knows my history," Joseph Smith once claimed. The title of this book is a sly rejoinder: Maybe once, no man knew your history, but now, one woman does.

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. 

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.

As someone who personally knows this author, I can say with absolute certainty that this is one of the best go-to books for anyone interested in cult structure and the dynamics of cult involvement. If you’ve ever been perplexed by how someone could possibly get involved in not just a religion-based cult, but also a politics-based cult, then this is the volume for you. It’s intriguing, as well as informative.  

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.

A full quarter-century later, what did we learn about the how and why of modern American school shootings from the 1999 slaughter at Columbine High School in Colorado? Not much, apparently, since they still occur with random regularity.

But it’s all here, in Cullen’s remarkable account, in granular detail—the who, how, and why of two rather isolated boys who donned their dusters and walked into their school with guns blazing. The subject matter might be sickening, but this indelible portrait of the perps and victims is essential reading if we have any hope of stemming the madness. 

I love fiction and nonfiction and part of the reason I’ve included one of Krakauer’s books is because he’s an excellent author of nonfiction.

I feel like I needed to include a nonfiction book, and I’ve thought much about Krakauer’s book since reading it a decade ago.

This book has it all: a compelling story, murder, the history of a myth (the Mormon religion), the reasons for religious extremism, and more. It’s a great story, well told, within the kind of context you look for in a nonfiction book. And, like the other books on this list, it opened my eyes about many different perspectives. 

The Road to Jonestown is a solid, comprehensive account of the long road that led Jim Jones and more than 900 of his followers to take their lives in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, by literally drinking the Kool-Aid.

What Guinn does well is show the early appeal of Jones’s church, its message of inter-racial harmony and social justice which attracted many idealistic young people as well as a substantial number of African-American followers. The book explains Jones’ repeated contacts with Father Divine and his Peace Mission movement.

Jones was a complex mix of charismatic preacher and flim-flam man – both deeply insecure and wildly grandiose with a pronounced tendency toward victimhood and paranoia which became increasingly pronounced as he led his group to its apocalypse. 

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… show more.