My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes

frankfrank13

Underground, by Murakami, was one of the better books I've read. It mostly covers victims, but the later chapters are interviews with various members of the Aum cult. It does a pretty decent job of presenting the psyche of the type of person who joins, stays, and some that leave. Although mostly relevant for what he calls the "Japanese psyche" I still found it very insightful.

zenapollo

I can also recommend the book Mindfuckers - a source book on the rise of acid fascism in America. Each chapter is about a different cult from the 60s and 70s including one on the Manson's. Super interesting read.

zabzonk

Not exactly a cult, but... "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. It sounds like fun, until it doesn't so much. Soundtrack by The Grateful Dead.

derektank

The author alluded to it, but I really think the BITE model of authoritarian control[0] is something everyone should know about. BITE stands for Behavioral, Information, Thought, and Emotional, which describes the 4 categories of controlling behaviors used by authoritarian groups (from religious cults, to the Maoist movement in post-war China, to multilevel marketing schemes). They really are surprisingly consistent, from controlling what members wear or how they cut their hair and encouraging sleep deprivation on the Behavioral side, to discouraging access to external sources of information, punishing people for asking questions or engaging in struggle sessions to get people to confess to false beliefs, and isolating people from the other people in their life that may love and care for them. Not everyone or every group that exhibits some of these behaviors is going to be a cult. But the warning signs are something everyone should be aware of. [0] https://freedomofmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/The-BIT...

lawn

I quite like The Cult of Trump due to the relevance to current events.

swatcoder

I'm sure these are all entertaining and engaging and reveal some exciting insider details, but it's worth keeping in mind that memoirs like these are closer to fiction than most things we think of as "nonfiction". They're individual testimonies, often nearly impossible to verify, and written in an era where "autofiction" and "creative non-fiction" are mature commercial genres with their own tropes, standards, forms, and conceits. If you're intellectually curious about "cults, scams, and schemes", there's a whole other -- drier but more earnest -- world of nonfiction to be found in places like JSTOR or the catalogs of academic presses.

gmiller123456

"Seductive Poison" is a good one. It's a story about the "Koolaid suicide" cult. It's one lady's story about how she got indoctrinated, abused, and ultimately escaped from Jonestown. It's told from her perspective, and really does a good job of showing how a seemingly reasonable person can get wrapped up in that.

ccppurcell

If you haven't read it already, Fads and Fallacies by Martin Gardner is a great book. A bit more focused on pseudoscience than on cults but Scientology comes up for instance.

ktallett

If we are talking about scams an obvious one is Bad Blood, about the Theranos scam.

Hackbraten

No literature list on MLM scams can be complete without Bridget Read's meticulously researched 2025 book "Little Bosses Everywhere".