In The Days of Rain describes how an already tight grip on loyalty became squeezed even harder, as a new American Brethren leader, “Big Jim” Taylor Junior, exerted a stranglehold. A father-daughter story that tells of the the author's experience growing up in the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist, separatist Christian cult, from the author of the national bestseller Ghostwalk. He had also started the gambling habit that would become a lifelong pathological addiction and lead to a spell in prison in 1982. Regardless, Stott’s account of her life within The Brethren makes for compelling reading - I could not put it down. He could only brush the surface of the past though as every time he ventured deeper into his memories the mental anguish meant that he could not carry on.

Rebecca Stott's family has been in a religious group named the Extreme Brethren for several generations. Rebecca Stott’s memoir about her family’s involvement with the Exclusive Brethren is divided into three parts: her formative years in the sect, her father’s disillusionment when scandal engulfed its leadership and the family’s subsequent withdrawal from the group to become part of ‘the normal world’. The sect broke down when the leader was discovered to be an advanced alcoholic who was having sex with a congregant's wife. I have an interest in religious cults and I have a read a lot of books on the subject, including memoirs from former members; but I’d never heard of The Brethren.In Stott’s case, her dying father asks for her help in documenting his own role as an influential (and intimidating) preacher in the Exclusive Brethren, the ultra-hardline Christian fundamentalist creationist sect (still active today) into which Stott was born.

Gayle King shares video of Oprah Winfrey reading to her grandson Luca in a sweet 70th birthday tribute. Julia Samton, MD, a psychiatrist at NYC's Manhattan Neuropsychiatric who offers light therapy in her practice, takes that advice a step further.There is Thunder (Michael Santoro), a tile maker fighting to keep his business from going under, and Denis (Joey Billow), a mentally handicapped janitor who is faced with losing his job. The condition for obtaining the promised blessings is that they are to be sought from the Lord, not from idols. The northern and western regions of the UK – where rainfall is arriving from the Atlantic – tend to be the wettest in the country. I feel fortunate that the religion I was raised in, though cultish in some respects, never took advantage of its members in such crass and offensive ways.

The crazed, charismatic leader separating his flock from society seems to be peculiar to cults (see Koresh, David; Jones, Jim; and any number of others).The idea of living in 1970 and not even having heard of the Beatles, much less listened to their music, was hard for me to fathom. A father-daughter story as well as a memoir of growing up in a closed-off community and then finding a way out of it, this is an inspiring and beautiful account of the bonds of family Like so much in the world that it affects to despise, The Exclusive Brethren has since undergone a PR rebranding. I found this book to be very eye-opening and thought provoking, as well as very honestly portraying how cults, The Brethren in particular, operate. In a terrifying passage echoing Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, Stott describes how one of her female relatives was sent to an asylum for decades, ostensibly because she was epileptic, but also because she was “wilful”.