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Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age
by Leah Sottile
An investigation of the New Age movement in America that aims to understand its appeal to women and the self-proclaimed prophetesses, like Love Has Won's Amy Carlson, who've created kingdoms for themselves within it.
Known for deep dives into true crime, extremist ideologies and fringe subcultures, journalist Leah Sottile turns her investigative eye toward American New Age culture. Today, tarot cards, astrology and crystals are everywhere — from Instagram and TikTok, to upscale boutiques and pricey wellness retreats. Sottile investigates how the recent surge of interest in New Age ideas speaks to a culture that is woven into the very fabric of America, and how self-professed gurus like Love Has Won's Mother God and the mysterious channeler Ramtha have built devout followings because of it. For more than a century, this pastel-colored world of love, light and enlightenment has been built upon a foundation of conspiracies, antisemitism, nationalism and a rejection of science.
In Blazing Eye Sees All, Sottile seeks to understand the quest for New Age spirituality in an era of fear that has made us open to anything that claims to bring relief — from war, the climate crisis, COVID 19, or the myriad of other issues we face. At the same time, she attempts to draw a line between truly helpful, healing ideas and snake oil. The new New Age is everywhere, and Sottile helps us sort through the crystals to find true clarity.
"[An] ambitious study...Leaving no crystal unturned, Sottile unearths intriguing similarities across disparate fringe groups (near-constant antisemitism, frequent female leadership) that bolster her thesis that cults are a feature, not a bug, of American spiritual life, functioning as an outlet for repressed women enmeshed in patriarchal belief structures. It's a must-read for cult obsessives." —Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"This book, wide in scope and remarkable for its timeliness, is a riveting account of the entire case (which is currently awaiting trial), including an exquisitely researched history of LDS and its fringe offshoots." —Booklist (starred review)
"A fascinating look into the fun-house mirror of cults and the occult." —Kirkus Reviews
"I have never read a better - or more entertaining - analysis of so-called New Age Spirituality and its self-anointed prophets than Lisa Sottile's Blazing Eye Sees All. In this book, even the infamous Love Has Won cult doesn't win, but readers do. See for yourself." ―Jeff Guinn, author of Manson, The Road to Jonestown, and Waco
"Leah Sottile is one of our foremost chroniclers of American extremism, and in Blazing Eye Sees All she reveals the conspiracism, fakery, and abuses of power embedded in New Age culture. A fascinating, unsettling, and, yes, enlightening investigation of an extremist movement operating in plain sight." ―Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts
This information about Blazing Eye Sees All was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Leah Sottile is the author of When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow Chad Daybell, and A Story of Murder, Wild Faith and End Times. Her investigations, features and essays have been published by the The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic and High Country News. She is the host of the investigative podcasts Hush, Burn Wild, Two Minutes Past Nine and Bundyville. She lives in Oregon.
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