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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorBanished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church
Lauren Drain · 300 pages
"In the tradition of Escape and Stolen innocence, the first look behind the curtains of the Westboro Baptist Church, by a young woman cast out from its clutches"--Provided by the publisher. Lauren Drain's childhood seemed average American, but when her liberal-minded father set out to film a documentary about the audacious and cultish hate group, the Westboro Baptist Church, he found himself se
Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs
Elissa Wall, Lisa Pulitzer · 438 pages
In September 2007, a packed courtroom in St. George, Utah, sat hushed as Elissa Wall, the star witness against polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs, gave captivating testimony of how Jeffs forced her to marry her first cousin at age fourteen. This harrowing and vivid account proved to be the most compelling evidence against Jeffs, showing the harsh realities of this closed community and the lengths
Escape
Carolyn Jessop, Laura Palmer · 426 pages
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman's courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral par
Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape
Jenna Miscavige Hill, Lisa Pulitzer · 416 pages
Jenna Miscavige Hill was raised to obey. As the niece of the Church of Scientology's leader David Miscavige, she grew up at the center of this highly controversial and powerful organization. But at twenty-one, Jenna made a daring break, risking everything she had ever known and loved to leave Scientology once and for all. Now she speaks out about her life, the Church, and her dramatic escape, goin
I Fired God: My Life Inside - and Escape from - the Secret World of the Independent Fundamental Baptist Cult
Jocelyn R. Zichterman
This book is a compelling memoir and investigation into the Independent Fundamental Baptist church and its shocking history of religious abuse. Jocelyn Zichterman was born, raised, married into, and finally, with her family, fled the Independent Fundamental Baptist church. Founded by the fiery preacher Bob Jones, with several hundred thousand, IFB members are told they must not associate with memb
Lost Boy
Brent W. Jeffs, Maia Szalavitz · 256 pages
In the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), girls can become valuable property as plural wives, but boys are expendable, even a liability. In this powerful and heartbreaking account, former FLDS member Brent Jeffs reveals both the terror and the love he experienced growing up on his prophet's compound--and the harsh exile existence that so many boys face on
The Sound of Gravel
Ruth Wariner · 352 pages
The true story of one girl's coming-of-age in a polygamist family. Ruth Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father's forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turn a blind eye to the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world
Not Without My Sister
Kristina Jones, Celeste Jones, Juliana Buhring · 432 pages
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots
Deborah Feldman · 272 pages
Traces the author's upbringing in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, describing the strict rules that governed her life, arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, and the birth of her son, which led to her plan to leave and forge her own path in life.
The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice
Rebecca Musser, M. Bridget Cook · 352 pages
A gripping account of Rebecca Musser's struggle to escape the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints led by Rulon Jeffs and his son, Warren, and her subsequent decision to take the witness stand against the new prophet of the FLDS in order to protect her little sisters and other young girls from being forced to marry at shockingly young ages.
A Wolf at the Table
Augusten Burroughs · 242 pages
PREQUEL TO THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER RUNNING WITH SCISSORSFrom the author: 'My father doesn't feature much in Running with Scissors. And one of the reasons for this is because he didn't feature much in my life. But there's another reason, too: Our relationship was so complicated, so dark, so confusing and so big, that to tell the story would require a book. So finally, upon the death of my fath
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
John Elder Robison · 304 pages
Ever since he was small, John Robison had longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits--an inclination to blurt out non sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother in them)--had earned him the label "social deviant." No guidance came from his mother, who conversed with light fixtures, or his father
The Anti-Cool Girl
Rosie Waterland · 304 pages
Not My Father's Son
Alan Cumming · 304 pages
**Acclaimed actor Alan Cumming shares the raw and emotional story of his turbulent relationship with his father and the long-buried family secrets that shaped his life and career.** A beloved star of stage, television, and film, Alan Cumming is celebrated for his unparalleled diversity and fearlessness as an artist. However, his success conceals a painful childhood marked by the heavy hand of a
Off Balance: A Memoir
Dominique Moceanu, Teri Williams
Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter
Adeline Yen Mah · 224 pages
A riveting memoir of a girl's painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family during the 1940s.A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother
Betrayed
Lyndsey Harris, Andrew Crofts · 320 pages
A mother. A daughter. A family torn apart. The heartbreaking true story of an unimaginable betrayal. For the first six years of her life, Sarah Harris was a normal, happy, popular little girl. But from the age of six her life was a living hell - as she became the victim of a vicious eighteen-month hate campaign. Before long she was suspended from school, alienated from her friends, completely bewi
Somebody's Daughter
Ashley C. Ford · 264 pages
Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple
Deborah Layton · 309 pages
From Waco to Heaven's Gate, the past decade has seen its share of cult tragedies. But none has been quite so dramatic or compelling as the Jonestown massacre, in which the Reverend Jim Jones and 913 of his disciples of the Peoples Temple perished. In Seductive Poison, Deborah Layton writes about the Peoples Temple as it has never been written about before: with the keen hindsight and insider persp
Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology
Marc Headley · 389 pages
The author details the horrors of his slave-like existence as a captive Scientologist whose parents were in the organization and who was forced to attend Scientology schools, do Scientology course work, and who, out of desperation, joined the sea-org at fifteen. The punitive, coercive, and sadistic nature of the organization and the horrors he lived through are vividly told in a chilling, conversa
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You
Sue William Silverman · 280 pages
From age four to eighteen Sue William Silverman was sexually abused with numbing regularity by her father, a high-ranking government official and successful banker. Rendered in often graphic detail, her story annihilates our complacency about who among us could commit such evil - and who could stop it, for this is also a story of complicity, of the blaming silence with which Silverman's mother met
A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today
Kate Bornstein · 258 pages
In the early 1970s, a boy from a Conservative Jewish family joined the Church of Scientology. In 1981, that boy officially left the movement and ultimately transitioned into a woman. A few years later, she stopped calling herself a woman—and became a famous gender outlaw. Gender theorist, performance artist, and author Kate Bornstein is set to change lives with her stunningly original memoir. W
Call Me Cockroach
Leigh Byrne · 332 pages