A hauntingly honest and revealing memoir.
A survivor’s account of the seductiveness of an “everyday cult.”
This book is part memoir, part warning. Buglion, a cult-awareness consultant, devotes her debut book to her experience with a group she renames the “Center for Transformational Learning.” It initially appeared benignly therapeutic, she says, with its focus on “the work,” which “included a lot of longing, learning about myself, and a whole lot of idealizing,” and its use of Jungian psychology in the apparent service of healing and growth. Specifically, the author sets out to refute the notion that the methods of cults are always easy to spot. The style of the book itself demonstrates how slowly warning signs appear, and when Buglion reveals an experience with the cult’s more overt methods of control—an incident involving strangling—it’s genuinely shocking. The author takes care to explain how, even after experiencing such red flags, she remained so invested in the group. One thread about her own house-cleaning business, and the influence that the cult had on it, illustrates how cultists taught her not to trust her instincts—until a frightening discovery awakened her to the necessity of doing so. She also speaks about the ill effects of her membership on her family relationships, as when she missed her own brother’s funeral to attend a cult retreat. The book’s searing honesty does a service for cult survivors, and will also be informative to those who don’t understand how thin the line can be between a benign organization and a dangerous one; the most telltale sign of the latter, Buglion points out, is that you can never graduate from it. She also provides a thorough examination of the stages of cult participation, from “Falling” and “Drifting” to eventually “Snapping” out of its control, and, with luck, “Waking up Again and Again.” Near the end, the book becomes somewhat polemical in its discussion of cults’ authoritarianism, but it still provides good insights into how such control works.
A hauntingly honest and revealing memoir.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-57-869055-8
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
A passionate, gorgeously written fictional account of an intellectual Russian woman's journey back to God and the Orthodox Christianity of her ancestors. ``Veronica,'' a widow in her mid-40s, journeys to the ancient monastery of Dzhvari in Georgia with her beloved son Mitya. The monastery is tiny and austere, and mother and son are met by just three monks. Still, life there is a revelation. Practicing the ancient ``Jesus Prayer,'' taking Communion, and talking with the terse, insightful abbot, Father Michael, is like finding water after a lifetime of thirst to this member of the Russian intelligentsia. Although women generally are forbidden in the monastery, Veronica is given special permission to stay for a period of weeks. Realizing that her days there are numbered, she drinks in everything, talking with the abbot at every opportunity. Their conversations are anything but light: ``Father Michael had said that in order to believe in God and receive this truth you must offer your entire being—your heart, will, understanding, mode of life. What can understanding do by itself?'' When their brief stay is up, both mother and son seem to have tasted something of a truth that passes human understanding. The story then jumps ahead six years: Veronica, now 50, visits another near-abandoned monastery (this one for women) while she awaits word from her son, who has become a monk. Though lonely, she puts her life in God's hands, reflecting on all the holy and instructive encounters she has had since she became a Christian a mere decade before. Miraculously, she receives word that her son has been sent to serve as a priest in a remote parish: God is good. She'll join Mitya and will live the rest of her life plumbing the mystery of Christianity with her son. A contemporary Way of the Pilgrim, first published in Russia in 1989, that's also a profoundly moving look at the state of one brave Russian woman's soul.
Pub Date: July 2, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-59194-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
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