"Compulsively readable.... Manson can't ever succeed in being paroled out of that cell, not as long as
people with any sense at all can read this book."
-- William S. Burroughs
"A glimpse of part of the American experience that is rarely described from the inside.... It compels both
interest and horror."
-- The Washington Post
Publisher web site, October, 2002.
Summary
We have called him a devil and quarantined him behind such labels as "the most dangerous man alive."
But Charles Manson remains a shocking reminder of our own humanity gone awry. This astonishing book lays bare the
life and the mind of a man whose acts have left us horrified. His story provides an enormous amount of new information
about his life and how it led to the Tate-LaBianca murders, and reminds us of the complexity of the human condition.
Born in the middle of the Depression to an unmarried fifteen-year-old, Manson lived through a bewildering succession
of changing homes and substitute parents, until his mother finally asked the state authorities to assume his care
when he was twelve. Regimented and often brutalized in juvenile homes, Manson became immersed in a life of petty
theft, pimping, jail terms, and court appearances that culminated in seven years of prison. Released in 1967, he
suddenly found himself in the world of hippies and flower children, a world that not only accepted him, but even
glorified his anti-establishment values. It was a combination that led, for reasons only Charles Manson can fully
explain, to tragedy. Manson's story, distilled from seven years of interviews and examinations of his correspondence,
provides sobering insight into the making of a criminal mind, and a fascinating picture of the last years of the
sixties. No one who wants to understand that time, and the man who helped to bring it to a horrifying conclusion,
can miss reading this book.
