Reviews with content warning for Abortion - Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM

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Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman

19 reviews

robinwritesallthethings's review against another edition

dark hopeful informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

What It’s About: This book covers the rise and fall of the cult NXIVM. You may have heard of NXIVM already, since it was the subject of the documentary The Vow on HBO. I watched that first and then picked up this book because of it.

Plot: NXIVM is a fascinating and terrifying study of human behavior and how it can be manipulated on an extreme level. For those who are familiar with narcissists, a lot of the events in this book probably won’t be terribly surprising, but for those who aren’t, they’ll definitely learn how to spot one in the future, and I think that’s one of the big selling points of books like this. As it should be, the focus is on the victims and how they are continuing to recover from the ordeals they suffered. The story starts with the history leading to the creation of the cult and ends with the cult leader’s trial, so the narrative is complete.

Research and Organization: There’s a lot of research here, and it’s organized and sourced well. Berman did a lot of legwork and conducted a lot of interviews to make sure she had the full story. I also appreciate that she explained the various techniques the cult used to prey on its victims, which makes a big difference to understanding how so many clearly intelligent people could buy into the organization.

Trigger Warnings: Obviously, there’s a lot of abuse of several varieties present in this book. Emotional and sexual abuse are probably the biggest ones. Some of these abuses are against minors as well.

Final Thoughts: I wasn’t sure this book was going to provide any new information after watching The Vow, but I felt like it did. It also presented everything in a more chronological order, which made it easy to follow. The ending felt a little rushed to me, perhaps, but I did read the last half of the book in one sitting, so that might have been why. I didn’t reduce my rating because of it since, ultimately, I feel like the book accomplished its goal of explaining how a group like NXIVM became what it was. If you can handle reading about the terrible things that happened, it’s an illuminating story.

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makcrowley's review

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slow-paced

3.0

More pages than material, it was clearly well-researched but more detail than I needed and felt like the investigation was glazed over completely.

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lizmarasse's review

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.0

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applesodaperson's review

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dark informative tense fast-paced

4.5

This was definitely the most perfect true crime book I have ever read. I have listened to to true crime Youtubers and pocasts for years, and I loved how this book felt like listening to a true crime podcast. I liked how it went in chronological order (for the most part), because it made it very easy to follow and understand. This is something that I really don't think I'll Be Gone In The Dark did well, which is another true crime book I have read. That book left me feeling so confused about the timeline despite the fact that I was already familiar with that true crime case.
I also really liked how easy it was to remember who was who. The author repeated full names a lot, and gave context if it had been a while since they were mentioned, which made it really easy to keep track of all the people in this story.
I loved how over and over again, the pattern of people being coerced into the cult until they were too far in was highlighted. It really showed how exploitative Keith Raniere was, and showed how people got roped into doing crazy and horrible things for the cult.
Plus I just learning about cults and cult psychology in general, so this book was right up my alley. I think it was really well done and interesting. Overall, Keith Reniere sucks and is an absolutely terrible person.
Listened to on Libby.

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moonyreadsbystarlight's review

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challenging emotional informative reflective tense

4.25

What does it take to make a self improvement curriculum into a cult with an even more sick cult inside of it? It starts with one man with too much stock in a sketchy self-administered IQ test and an obsession with psychogical manipulation, MLMs, and Ayn Rand, but couldn't be realized without an intense social network.

The writing itself is very engaging and this is thoroughly researched. There was intense background on Raniere along with the full scope of his network and how it grew, but Berman also interviewed many women who were in NXIVM and used information from the court case to show their stories.

The events of what happened are truely wild. At a few points, I had to take a break from it and even considered stopping about 3/4 of the way in because as horrid as things had been at that point, there were a few really intense experiences that they went into. But I'm glad I did finish it. I didn't plan it this way, but I think this was a good bridge from Hey Hun by Emily Lynn Paulson into some of the books on Scientology that are on my TBR (yes, Raniere was clearly inspired by both Amway and L Ron Hubbard, though he denies clearly being inspired by dianetics).

If you're interested in cults or social psychology (and are ready for the sort of content that is present when talking about such awful groups), I would definitely recommend this.

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valzsc's review

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dark informative tense medium-paced

3.75

After listening to a few podcasts through the years, I thought I knew some things about NXIVM but I was wrong.

I love the way the story was told by the author. The fact that it is not written chronologically made it a lot more engaging, letting you know a little bit by bit until you get to the full story of each individual she interviewed or had context of.

As this story is really sad and dark, I don’t think it’s a book I would go back to (nor sooner, nor later). It is dark, twisted, and I feel bad for all the things these women went through. Really bad.

Overall, storytelling is great, it is engaging and entertaining and the story is heartbreaking. If you want to add to the mix you can also watch the show, it’s called The Vow, so you get the audiovisual experience (also getting to know more of Nancy Salzman’s side of the story, whom I think is not mentioned a lot on this book)

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