Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [196]
David Halberstam's The Fifties and Stephen Whitfield's The Culture of the Cold War helped me understand the sociopolitical environment in which Scientology was born, as did Hugh Urban's excellent paper "Fair Game: Secrecy, Security, and the Church of Scientology in Cold War America." I was hugely grateful to those who worked with L. Ron Hubbard who suggested I read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich to glean an understanding of the business psychology mindset of the 1950s and how that may have played into Hubbard's thinking. Scientology has been called by more than one critic the McDonald's of religion—I found this to be true, not only in terms of its real estate strategy but also in its overall franchising concept. To gain a better understanding of franchising, I found John F. Love's McDonald's: Behind the Arches to be a fascinating corporate study.
Phillip Jenkins's Mystics and Messiahs and Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay are excellent references on the development of cults and new religious movements, as well as the personality traits of gurus. I would have been lost without Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, which provided both inspiration and in many ways an ideal model for how to tell the story of a little-understood religious movement. George Pendle's Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of John Whiteside Parsons was invaluable in providing research into the life of John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons and the culture of physics in southern California. For historical and sociological perspectives on the birth and development of Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century, my first and best resource was the journalist Carey McWilliams's Southern California: An Island of the Land; I also appreciated Mike Davis's City of Quartz and Kevin Starr's The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s, which devotes a chapter to Pasadena and Caltech.
Some of the very best coverage of the Church of Scientology has appeared in the St. Petersburg Times, theNew York Times, and theLos Angeles Times—Pulitzer Prize winners all, for their reporting on the church in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, the investigative reporter Richard Behar did some of the bravest and most groundbreaking reporting on the movement, first for Fortune, and then for Time magazine. The reporting of journalists at the Boston Herald and theWall Street Journal provided great help in my research into the Church of Scientology's social betterment organizations and its IRS tax battle and secret agreement; the Lisa McPherson case might have never come to light were it not for the reporting of Cheryl Waldrip from theTampa Tribune, who broke the story of Lisa's death in 1996. I also owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Robert Farley at the St. Petersburg Times for his continued assistance and research, and to his colleagues, Tom Tobin and Joe Childs, whose 2009 and 2010 reporting on abuse at the International Base confirmed many of the stories I had been told by former staffers and officials for several years prior. The thoroughness of the Times's recent coverage, particularly the paper's video interviews with Marty Rathbun, which were posted on the paper's website, were invaluable to me in piecing together the very complex story of