The Breakthrough Book on Mind Breaking in America Has Broken New Ground – Again!
Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change
Updated and Expanded 2nd Edition
by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman
Now Available in a New Kindle Edition!
In June, 1978, six months before the cult massacre in Jonestown, Guyana, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman published SNAPPING, a groundbreaking investigation of the spreading epidemic of sudden, drastic personality changes that was bringing a frightening new era of personal loss and horrific human tragedies. SNAPPING went on to sell 100,000 hardcover and trade paperback copies and become a required text in high school and college classes in psychology, sociology, persuasion, mass communication, criminology, and comparative religion.
Now SNAPPING is back in an expanded and updated 2nd Edition. Snapping is on the rise among zealous cult members, born-again Christians, anti-government ideologues, participants in popular self-help, professional training and “stress reduction” programs–and, increasingly, among people in everyday life situations. And the epidemic is spreading worldwide in the 21st century. In this Stillpoint Press edition, the authors show how powerful, mind-altering spiritual and personal growth practices found in all these domains may impair the brain’s living information-processing powers and lead to profound personal changes, altered awareness, thinking, feeling and free choice, post-traumatic stress disorders, grand delusions, and violent destructive acts. In exclusive interviews and fascinating science, Conway and Siegelman span the history of snapping–from the 1969 Manson Family murders, to the 1978 Peoples Temple massacre, to the disastrous 1993 siege and conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Findings in their award-winning study of the effects of new spiritual and personal growth practices—the first of its kind—along with a special postscript on the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the Aum Shinrikyo poison gas attack in the Tokyo subway, and the global rise of extremist “terror cells” of many persuasions complete this seminal work that calls for new ways to counter a mushrooming threat to the mental health of America and every civilized society.
ISBN: 0964765004
Stillpoint Press, Updated/Expanded 2nd Edition (1995/2005)
Softcover: 380 pages, illustrated $19.95
Praise For SNAPPING!
“Their book is judicious, sensible, well-researched and very frightening.”
– New York Times Book Review
“It is a book of investigative reporting at its best.”
– New York Post
“What Woodward and Bernstein were to Watergate, Conway and Siegelman may well be to the cults.”
– United Press International
“CLASSIC RETURNS . . . . More timely now than when first published . . . An important title for academic and public libraries.”
– Library Journal
“Credible and chilling . . . The second edition of SNAPPING is as important a resource in understanding spreading societal chaos as the first edition was in explaining the chaos of cults.”
– Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Important. . . . this book provides a tool to exercise judgment, monitor incoming information, and interpret what has become an increasingly intrusive battle for our minds. . . . At its core, it is language that holds the key to our mental health or to our destruction. What George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ is to literature, ‘SNAPPING’ is to non-fiction.”
– Albuquerque Journal
“In a prophetic vein. . . . SNAPPING is not only fascinating and frightening reading, it is also extremely well-written. . . . The escalating pattern of cult fanaticism and religious-political terror that the authors call a ‘death spiral’ seems to be widening. If we do nothing to understand and ultimately reverse that pattern, it will pull more and more innocent people into its vortex.”
– Cleveland Jewish News
“For anyone threatened with snapping, this book is a dispassionate, valuable study of an often frightening phenomenon.”
– People
“There is no doubt that Conway and Siegelman are opening the door on areas of human understanding that have never been examined and that are in urgent need of study.”
– New Society
“A powerful look at a social phenomenon that is making headlines.”
– Bookviews
“SNAPPING is an exciting and responsible and original piece of research that has taught this old poop amazing new ways to think about the human mind.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“SNAPPING is by far the best and most scientific treatment of the cult problem yet published. For the scientist, politician, clergy or parent, it is valuable and wonderfully readable.”
– John G. Clark, M.D.
Asst. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School
“Conway and Siegelman . . . place cultic behavior in the wider context of the communication revolution of our time. . . Indeed, SNAPPING unfolds as a traveling detective investigation. . . . they very capably trace and analyze the course of the phenomenon and . . . contribute greatly to our understanding of it.”
– The Cult Observer
“Conway and Siegelman are onto something important. . . . SNAPPING is a fascinating book with frightening implications.”
– Edward T. Hall,
author of The Silent Language
“[The] classic book on cults, still the best book ever. . . . Believe me, folks, these are the real experts.”
– Geraldo Rivera
“Conway and Siegelman deliver a powerful book and an amazing yet responsible look at the inner workings of the human mind.”
– Examined Life Psychology Newsletter
Tattered Cover Books, Denver CO
**** – “One of the most important books of our time.”
– ultanno@hotmail.com, Amazon.com