“WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER I joined a radical religious cult.” With a candour that continues throughout, so begins John Titus’s detailed and absorbing account of the eight years he spent with the ‘Children of God’ or the ‘Family’: from the moment he stepped onto the ‘Loony Bus’ as an 18-year-old Christian and swapped ‘John’ for ‘Salem’, through eager passion, doubt, and concern, to quitting the cult in his mid-twenties with his wife and young son.

Intimate yet universal, at times distressing despite its infectious ‘gallows’ humor, this is a uniquely well-documented and well-written ‘tell-all’ on a cult that gradually succumbed to its leader’s fast spiral downward to egocentric bizarreness. Original verses that accompany each chapter, based on traditional fairy tales for children, feed into this sinister other-worldliness.

Unlike many other memoirs you might read on this theme, this authentic narrative is filled with photographs from those eight years, with extracts and images from the tracts and letters that were disseminated, and with the author’s soul-searching journal extracts that serve almost as a dialogue between past and present. Similarly unlike many books in this genre, John Titus steers clear of any hypocrisy. After all, he concludes, if cults had nothing good or enjoyable about them why would anyone bother hanging around?

Judge for yourself, as you reenact his journey in a book that is ultimately a reminder to us all that far from being ‘strange’ or ‘oddball’, it’s often those people most instinctively and selflessly dedicated to making a positive difference to our world that unwittingly find themselves manipulated and even trapped within a self-marginalizing and frighteningly invisible world.
Author's website: www.trippingup.net

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