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

Reviews tagging 'Sexual harassment'

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

14 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.

Content Warnings

makcrowley's review

Go to review page

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.

Content Warnings

cotalf92's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark informative medium-paced

3.0

Solid retelling of the progression of Keith Raniere’s control over NXIVM members. While the author covers many details and people involved with NXIVM, the story line is relatively easy to follow while listening to the audiobook.

Content Warnings

lizmarasse's review

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.0

Content Warnings

valzsc's review

Go to review page

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)

Content Warnings