80 Books Like Lost and Found

In 1988, I watched a TV special marking the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Jonestown. Did the producers ask who the dead were? How they’d found the People’s Temple? What they’d hoped for when they’d joined? If so, the answers didn’t stick. Nothing stuck but the heaps of corpses in lurid Technicolor—scenes from a horror film misfiled in real life. No wonder I sealed that story and others like it in a pit marked “evil,” “madness,” “them.” 

In this book, Scheeres shows that many entered the People’s Temple seeking what life outside had so far denied them: comfort, camaraderie, and the chance to serve what seemed a worthy cause. She shows how some fought to survive. She returns a throng of “them” to the ring of human understanding.

After ten years in a political cult, Janja Lalich dove deep into research on Heaven's Gate. Then she set out to explain, in this book, how smart, driven people function under coercive control. 

The gist? While they keep their intelligence and capacity for achievement, they shrink the range within which they act and think.

Lalich's perspective helped me understand why my fellow ex-Zendiks and I had acquiesced to so much dumb shit. We weren't stupid or brainwashed—just trapped by bounded choice.

Also, I was delighted by her account of her own cult's implosion, crystallized in the moment when the leader pulls out a cigarette and no one offers a light. 

Fourteen months after leaving Zendik, still a true believer, I realized that I was not a fucked-up failure—Zendik was one fucked-up place. Then, reading Combatting Cult Mind Control, I saw how Zendik fit the cult pattern. How I'd fallen for yet another tired variation on an all too well-worn scheme.

In this book, Hassan adds to the foundation laid by his first book. Most notably, he lays out ways to approach cult members with curiosity, not judgment. Forget arguing and hole-poking, he says. Focus instead on offering unconditional love and letting them come to their own liberating conclusions at their own pace.

In fictional Union Grove, post-collapse, it takes a cult—the New Faith Church—to sustain a village. Equipped with social cohesion, ecstatic optimism, and shared purpose, the New Faithers come through for their neighbors in surprising and admirable ways.

I love this book because it shows the bright side of cult life. The New Faithers remind me of myself and my fellow Zendiks at our best. For all our failings, we sure did know how to band together to get shit done. 

I found this book extremely important because it finally put to bed the myth that counter-cultural women were merely subservient to their male counterparts, while these women did so much to actually shape the counter-culture.

I recommend reading this alongside Nina Graboi’s criminally neglected autobiography–One Foot in the Future–that serves as a perfect illustration of American women successfully looking for empowerment in these counter-cultural enclaves.

It’s so tough to choose just one novel from Phyllis Whitney’s voluminous stack.

She is quite arguably the queen of the gothic suspense genre. With this pick published in 1974, I am highlighting my very first read by her.

Why do I love it? It rocked my world and, to this day, draws me right into its web.

With all her books, she depicts unique settings that allow for “armchair travel”. This one is set in what was a completely exotic location to my younger self, the American Southwest.

I also learned about the element of suspense from this novel mixed together with gothic details. The mask and how it fits into this mystery is so chilling that I have never forgotten it.

Old Cold Cannibal is a bit of an outlier in this list, as it doesn’t fully conform to the Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett style of humor/narration or plotting. But it’s a unique book with an amazing voice. I have a soft spot for harsh 1800s white narrators whose doubling down on arrogance and (historically accurate) racism wrap around from being awful to weirdly and unsettlingly charming. Old Cold Cannibal delivers on that 100% and allows it to infuse some humor into what is otherwise a very dark and disturbing narrative that follows a journey across the pre-Civil War U.S. to find and slay a dragon. It’s a rough, but entertaining read.

This is a nonfiction book and typical of New Mexico, as there are whole chapters of its history nobody really knows about. The (probably) first white American woman to come into the territory was a Jewish woman who accompanied her merchant husband and brothers. Even more interesting, merchants and traders weren’t even the first Jewish people - “Crypto-Jews” who were fleeing the inquisition came to New Mexico long before it was part of the US and kept their identity secret to assimilate. This is depicted with a character in Alburquerque and that perfectly encapsulates one of the overriding things about New Mexico and its tales – a deep sense of connectedness, across people, across the land. 

Carolina walks a fine line between reality and magic, a state of mind many a struggling child understands.

Stuck with her grandfather, whose mind is failing, she finds a special connection to the fantastical stories he tells of a lake and bees and a tree, all connected with love of family and one’s roots. She forms a special bond with her “crazy” grandfather.

His stories about the tree with the magical power to bring people back together especially rings true. Who doesn’t believe in the magic of trees, especially old trees with deep roots (I still do). When Carolina rescues her grandfather from the old folks home and convinces her parents not to sell the family ranch, everything comes together.

Reality and magic really do belong together.

Dealing with an addicted child or sibling is traumatic enough; when the addict is your parent, the person who is supposed to protect and support you, the fear and betrayal are ramped up to an unbearable level. One of the Boys captures this in all its harrowing detail. Two barely teenaged boys move with their father from Kansas to New Mexico, where the father’s descent into meth addiction obliterates any sense of responsibility, affection, and decency he might once have possessed. Narrated by the younger son, One of the Boys is more than a realistic depiction of addiction; it also shows how far children will go to gain or retain a parent’s love, which is what makes the story so devastating.