Sybil Exposed, by Debbie Nathan

Why I read it: Salon review

Podcasts: None

Brow: It was a sordid case of psychiatry and journalism gone mad that inevitably became hugely popular. Writing a biography that exposes that fact does not elevate it above low brow.

Summary: In the 1970s, a book called Sybil appeared, the supposedly true story of a woman who had 16 personalities and the psychiatrist who put her back together. The book launched a new psychiatric diagnosis: Multiple Personality Disorder, in which a person's psyche 'splits' as a way to cope with severe sexual abuse, usually Satanic in nature. Each new personality periodically takes over the brain and body of the host, leaving her (the overwhelming majority of sufferers were women) with large tranches of time that she can't remember. For the next 20 years or so, MPD, repressed memories and Satanic cults were a popular trend in psychiatry and daytime talk shows, until society finally came to its senses in the 1990s and realised that the phenomenon was largely made up. Debbie Nathan researched the three women behind the craze: the original 'Sybil', her psychiatrist, Connie Wilbur, and the journalist who helped them sensationalise their story. She traces 'Sybil's' (real name: Shirley Mason) journey from being a misfit in her Seventh-Day Adventist community in Iowa to troubled college student in New York who falls under the spell of an ethically-challenged psychiatrist named Connie Wilbur, who was looking to make a name for herself using the new drugs and treatments available to her profession, namely hypnosis, sodium pentothal or 'truth serum', barbiturates and insulin. She quickly turned her patient into a junkie and forced her to make up ever more outlandish tales about her childhood in order to keep her attention. The journalist had made a name for herself publishing human-interest stories about politicians' wives, but as public interest waned, she needed a new hook for her audience. This toxic combination yielded Sybil.

But should you read it? I was a little young to understand the whole 'Satanic ritual abuse' craze at the time it was happening, but I was a little more politically aware by the time it was being exposed as a giant hoax propagated by paranoid prosecutors and overzealous psychiatrists. I also studied psychology at university, where this was held up as the classic case study of therapeutic overreach. It's also a good reminder to all of us that mass hysteria is not a new phenomenon and we need to be careful about falling prey to it all the time, regardless of our experience with psychiatry.

Love to Love you Bradys, by Ted Nichelson, Susan Olson and Lisa Sutton

Why I read it: Salon Review

Podcasts: Amazingly, yes, there is a podcast for this book, but not for Robertson Davies.

Brow: Low, but like, hipster-cool lowbrow.

Summary: In 1976, television hit its nadir. Not only were variety shows all the rage, it looked like variety shows starring large families were about to take off, since The Donny and Marie Show was a hit. So superproducers Sid and Marty Krofft cast about for another large TV family that might possibly be trained to sing and dance and came up with The Brady Bunch, which had gone off the air a few years before. They reassembled most of the cast and set about turning them into vaudevillians. Somehow, this managed to stay on the air for 10 episodes. Like I said, nadir. Anyway, more than 30 years later, fans were still so curious to know the answers to such questions as 'Why didn't Eve Plumb participate?' that the authors were able to generate a 338-page book stuffed with fun facts and trivia, such as that Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia Marcia Marcia! was too stoned out of her mind to appear in several segments, which of course is never explained.

What I liked about it: As a child growing up in the 80s and 90s, I watched The Brady Bunch pretty much every day between 3:30 and dinner time, as there was always an episode on at least one channel. I even took Barry Williams' book Growing Up Brady out of the library and made my dad photocopy the episode-by-episode trivia out of the back of it so I could note all the ridiculous moments as I was watching. I also watched the TV movies and the commercial films, but in the days before the internet, I never saw this show. I wasn't totally obsessed, but I was interested enough to buy this book and find all the episodes on YouTube.

What I didn't like about it: As I said, I'm not totally obsessed, so an entire chapter on the women who played the dancers/synchronised swimmers and where they are today wasn't exactly scintillating. I was much more interested in reading about Florence Henderson's hissy fits or the ways the producers would try to keep the underage actors working overtime without getting fined by the California Labor Board.

Beyond Belief, by Jenna Miscavige Hill

Why I read it: Salon excerpt

Podcast: Freethought Radio

Brow: 'I escaped from a cult' autobiographies cannot possibly be rated higher than lower middle brow.

Summary: Jenna Miscavige Hill was born into Scientology. Her parents were so dedicated, they became members of Sea Org, the closest thing the cult has to a clergy. For the first few years of her life, they all lived together, but when she was 4, she was sent to be raised communally on a ranch in Hemet, California. When she was 7, she joined the Sea Org herself, signing a billion-year contract. She continued to be a devoted member for the rest of her childhood and adolescence, even though she was frequently punished for doing such things as trying to call her parents, who she only saw a few times a year, and forming an extremely tame relationship with a boy when she was 16. It later turned out that most of the punishment was actually for her parents, who left the church around that time. When she was 18, she fell in love with her future husband, also a member of Sea Org. But when her faith finally started to wane, the cult tried to keep him, thus necessitating the harrowing escape of the subtitle.

What I liked about it: I don't know what it is that draws me to Scientology books - this is the second I've read this year, after Lawrence Wright's Going Clear - the celebrities, the public weirdness of those celebrities, the weirdness in general, but for some reason I can't seem to get enough of them. This book is interesting because it wasn't written by or about a celebrity, unlike Wright's book. Rather, Miscavige Hill was an ordinary member and in fact having the same name as her uncle, cult leader David Miscavige, turned out to cause her more trouble. So we learn a lot about what ordinary life is like for a member of the Sea Org, which turns out to be a lot of manual labour, plus a lot of looking words up in the dictionary, which is how L. Ron Hubbard thought we clear ourselves of bad experiences in past lives so we can move up through various levels and become masters of the universe. If you think about it, it makes about as much sense as the religion that's all about a deity who has a son with a virgin and then that son goes on to get himself hung up on a cross but promises to come back some day and destroy the world.

What I didn't like about it: Although Miscavige Hill has been out of Scientology for a few years now, she hasn't quite shaken the habit of peppering her writing with Scientology jargon and then failing to explain it. So unless you're really good at remembering the difference between EPF and RPF or Flag Base versus Int Base, be prepared to spend a lot of time flipping to the back to remind yourself what CMO is.

EPF = Estates Project Force: basic training for new members of Sea Org, only with a lot more manual labour and a lot less target practice.
RPF = Rehabilitation Project Force: punishment for Sea Org members, often lasting years
Flag Base = International Spiritual Headquarters in Clearwater, Florida
Int Bast = formerly Gold Base, aka The Ranch, in Hemet, California, also where members in RPF are thought to be kept
CMO = Commodore's Messenger Unit: Formerly the core of L. Ron Hubbard's inner circle, now David Miscavige's inner circle.

Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford

Why I read it: Salon Review

Podcasts: New Books in History

Brow: Any book with the fictional inner voice of Nikita Khrushchev automatically rates as upper-middle brow.

Summary: Vignettes of everyday life in the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the 1970s, when it looked like the communist economy might actually overtake the capitalist west in terms of productivity and human development. Some of the characters are fictional, others are real.

What I liked about it: Everything. This is the first time in living memory that I read the footnotes at the end of every chapter in a book.

There is no linear narrative in this book. Each chapter is a portrait of some aspect of Soviet life in the 1950s through the 1970s, a time of optimism and social mobility for the young and educated, thanks to advances in science and technology, which were at least in part real. Some of the characters and incidents are real, some are lightly fictionalised versions of real events. All are great. To give one example, we'll take the case of Marina, who is given two chapters, the first when she's an ambitious student, and the second when she's a somewhat disillusioned married woman expecting her first child. When she goes into labour, she's taken to Moscow's best maternity hospital, where she's given an enema and forced to walk up the stairs to a ward with 7 other women struggling to deliver their babies, all without anaesthetic, because the Soviets told women that labour pains were a capitalist plot and that the secret to overcoming them was to not think about them. This happens as her contractions are 2 minutes apart. Every chapter is as filled with fun facts about everyday life in the time of Red Plenty as this one, even down to the excellent footnotes.

What I didn't like about it: There are some times when the chapter puts us inside the head of an obscure (to westerners, at least) Soviet official or scientist and you have to go back to the extensive list of characters at the beginning of the book to look that person up, which was not easy to do considering I read the digital edition on my phone, which is not the smartest of smartphones.

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, by Robert Gottlieb

Why I read it: Salon review

Podcasts: New York Review of Books

Brow: Tawdry tell-alls about the rich and powerful screwing up their kids, even written by distinguished former editors who publish in the New York Review of Books feels lower-middle brow at best.

Summary: Charles Dickens was prolific in more ways than his writing. All told, he and his wife Catherine produced ten babies from at least 12 pregnancies. Nine of them, two daughters and seven sons, survived into a adulthood, which was long enough for most of them, particularly the boys, to disappoint their father. The book is divided into two halves: their lives before Dickens' death in 1870, and what happened to them afterwards.

What I liked about it: I like a good take-down piece just as much as anyone else, and Dickens had much to be taken down. His main disappointment with his sons appears to be the thing that caused his own father's downfall and his resultant work in a boot-blacking factory: poor money management. Once sent away, they and their creditors wrote him constantly, asking for more money to pay gambling debts, or for the 25 pairs of kid-leather gloves they desperately needed. One is sent off to India with the military, returns to England after seven years, squanders his inheritance, and dies ignobly in Canada after a failed career in the Northwest Mounted Police. The youngest and perhaps most fragile son, Plorn, is sent off to Australia at just 16 and refuses to help pay to re-purchase the garden house his father wrote most of his works in after another son has to auction it off when he can't pay for the upkeep. One of the daughters can't get past being Miss Dickens and ends up living with a minister and his wife and possibly dies an alcoholic. Several others die young of one of the many diseases that took people in the days before food and water were safe and antibiotics had been discovered. Only three children can be said to be real successes: Katie, who was a moderately successful painter with a wide social network, Charley, who was eventually allowed to take over his father's literary magazine, and Henry, who was sent to Cambridge and became a judge.

What I didn't like about it: I can't really fault the author for this, as he certainly seems to have done his research, but there are very few details, especially about the less successful kids. For example, it's never clear if the constant begging letters are a result of gambling or of extravagant purchases. Nor is it clear what the situation was with the wayward daughter. But that is mostly a result of Victorian morals: nobody wanted to say it out loud.

Life After Death, by Damien Echols

Why I read it: Salon review

Podcasts: Live from the NYPL

Brow: Post-prison memoirs, even if the accused was innocent and has literary ambitions, are never going to rank higher than middle brow, if not lower-middle brow.

Summary: In 1993, Damien Echols, his best friend, and an acquaintance were convicted of killing 3 little boys in what the prosecutors called a Satanic ritual. Echols was 18 and sentenced to death, after a shoddy trial with no evidence and coerced witnesses. The three spent the next 18 years in prison, despite three HBO documentaries investigating the case and demonstrating their innocence, and numerous singers and artists contributing funds to a new defense. They were finally freed in 2011 by entering an Alford plea, in which they are able to maintain their innocence while admitting that the state has enough evidence to convict them.

What I liked about it: 3 minutes of Googling is enough for anyone to conclude that the American justice system is entirely broken, with millions of poor black people locked up for years on plea bargains for non-violent drug offenses so that poor white people can have jobs incarcerating them. I read an article a few months ago about another wrongful murder conviction in which a judge said that he had no interest in re-opening old cases for wrongful conviction, and would only be willing to reconsider convictions if the defendant could demonstrate a procedural error. The West Memphis Three may not have been black, but they certainly were poor, and there certainly were procedural errors in their convictions. This book is a welcome addition to the railroaded by the justice system that just needed a body to convict genre.

What I didn't like about it: This may not be fair on my part, as an educated middle-class person who is not the target of any justice system and who grew up in a country which is hopefully more just than the US, but at several points in the book, Echols comes across as maddeningly passive in the face of his own destiny. For example, he writes that he was stunned throughout most of the trial and wasn't paying much attention. Most of us at least like to think we'd be fighting like mad dogs in that situation, but of course we'll never be in it.

Some Girls, Jillian Lauren

Why I read it: Salon reference

Podcasts: Blog Talk Radio

Brow: Feels pretty low to me.

Summary: Jillian Lauren drops out of college after 6 weeks to pursue her acting dream. When her parents cut her off, she turns to stripping and working as an escort to make ends meet. One day, one of her colleagues mentions a new, more lucrative opportunity: going to the far-away land of Brunei as one of the 'party girls' in Prince Jefri's harem. Lauren takes off on a whim and with the promise of $20 000 in cash for two weeks' work. Once there, she discovers that life as a caged bird is not all that it's cracked up to be, no matter how gilded the cage: when you put 40 women into a room and force them to compete for one man's attentions, things get pretty competitive, pretty fast. Nonetheless, our heroine prevails, eventually clawing her way up to number 2 girlfriend and winning fabulous shopping trips and jewellery for her pains. She returns after a year and a half and finds a nice husband and a happy life with dozens of gossipy stories to share.

What I like about it: I can't say I'm deeply read in the 'autobiography of a sex worker' genre, but most of them seem to be about girls who were sexually abused in their youth and eventually sold into virtual slavery, only to escape years later and write a memoir of survival despite the odds. Jillian Lauren is not that type of sex worker. She had a rocky relationship with her parents, yes, but she was not abused, nor was she coerced into her lifestyle. She also enjoys her time in Brunei and manages to use at least part of it productively to figure out what she wants to do next in life.

What I didn't like about it: Not enough details about Brunei! Lauren only describes one sexual encounter with the prince and one insane shopping trip to Singapore as a reward. C'mon girl! You spend a year and a half there, what else happened?

Blood and Politics, by Leonard Zeskind

Why I read it: Salon review


Podcasts: None

Brow: Off the charts

Summary: An extremely thorough account of modern-day white nationalism since the end of WWII and the birth of the civil rights movement to post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiments. We meet all kinds of colourful characters from the granddaddy of 20th century racism, Willis Carto, to David Duke, who tried to bring the crusade into the mainstream with some success, to the movement's current, fractured leaders. We also hear about incidents ranging from the amusing - a survivor suing Carto after he refused to pay him for proving the holocaust really did happen - to the terrifying - an Arkansas man who shot a black state trooper for pulling him over, then spent the next several months being sheltered in a campground with the police surrounding them.

What I liked about it: This is a great book for nerds who like to know literally everything about a subject. Fortunately I'm a nerd and now I know, for example, about the connection between neo-nazis, the Christian Identity movement, and the killing of abortion doctors.

What I didn't like about it: At 645 pages, if all you're looking for is a short introduction and summary, this is definitely not the book for you.

The Dinner, by Herman Koch

Reason for reading: Salon review

Podcasts: None

Brow: Low to middle in Europe, middle to high outside Europe

Summary: Paul Lohman and his wife Claire have met for dinner with his brother Serge, a politician likely to be elected Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and his wife Babette. The ostensible reason for the dinner is to discuss the heinous crime their sons have committed and how to deal with the potential aftermath if it is discovered.

What I liked about it: I love a good unreliable narrator, and Paul is a shining exemplar. When we first meet him, he appears to be a normal, middle-class Dutchman, which is to say very normal indeed. But as the evening progresses and we're privy to his cynical thoughts and revelations about the restaurant his brother has chosen, Dutch people who love rural France, his own past, and what he discovered on his son's phone just before he left that evening, we find out just how far he's prepared to go to keep his family's secrets hidden.

Also, because I live in the Netherlands and therefore among the Dutch, it's always fun to hear them being self-critical.

What I didn't like about it: There is very little to dislike about this book if you're a fan of dark parodies like me.