Meant to be liberating, the Sullivanian community became a nightmare

“How many cults have reunions?” So muses a former member of the Sullivanians, a therapeutic community that thrived in New York in the 1960s. As Alexander Stille shows in this absorbing account of the group’s rise and fall, many of its alumni do indeed remain in close contact with each other. But others regard it as a failed utopia or even “the most traumatic experience of their lives”. One interviewee tells Mr Stille, whose previous books have covered his own parents’ marital woes and the Sicilian Mafia, that he “joined a movement that turned into a business, that became a racket”. Another describes the Sullivanians’ driving force, Saul Newton, as “a sexual monster”.