Beyond Belief My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape

One of the problems in writing about Scientology is that its credos are both highly complex and utterly meaningless. The religion was created by a not-so-bright guy who thought he was a genius (recipe for disaster), and not-so-bright people who think they're geniuses tend to believe that the more complicated and dense something is, the more brilliant. As a result, in learning about this religion, the reader has innumerable stupid jargon words to contend with (“out-ethics”, “enturbulated”), and has to learn about so many pointlessly complicated “training exercises” that make no sense but that last literally weeks. (Example: L Ron Hubbard, pedagogical revolutionary, believes that people learn best by stating every definition of every word they read as they go, and starting all over again from the beginning every time they make a mistake. Imagine reading this review, starting with the word “one”, providing every definition of that word, then moving on to do the same for “of” and “the” and so on. What a rich understanding of the text you'd have!)

The problem is that this author's writing and level of . . . I don't know, analysis? Reflection? are at about an 8th grade level, though it gets better as the book goes on. It frequently makes the tedium of Scientology tedious to read about. Under more capable hands, that tedium could be elevated to absurdity, irony, pathos, I don't know – anything else. I wish a better writer had taken this fascinating story on. Still worth a read.