Blazing Eye was a wild ride! Great on audio. I liked the exploration of Love Has Won but also the history of "new age" mystical groups. It was well structured and propulsive.

I've always thought cults are like murder. You like to think you're not capable of joining one--or killing someone--but if the circumstances are just right, if you're desperate enough, who can say for sure? There's an element of dating to it too, though; every now and then I learn about a cult I can safely say holds no appeal. Love Has Won is such a cult. The leader, Amy Carlson, claimed to be god, talked to aliens, had a parasocial relationship with dead celebrities, and also spewed hatred and medical misinformation online. The reason people know about her, if they know about her at all, is because of the HBO documentary showing how she withered away and eventually died from anorexia, alcoholism, and colloidal silver poisoning (at which point her followers kept and decorated her mummified corpse). It's shocking and sad and, as Leah Sottile shows in Blazing Eye Sees All, somehow inevitable.

Sottile ably shows Amy as the latest in a long line of New Age liars and grifters. Chapters alternate between Love Has Won and other b.s. artists through the ages: sisters pretending to be mediums, wackadoodles hanging around Mt. Shasta, and my personal favorite--Ramtha, the "30,000 year old warrior" supposedly channeled through the body of a random white lady who badly wanted people to pay attention to her. It's easy to make fun of stuff like this, but this is the age of Q and ivermectin and almond moms who would rather pay a scammer for "etheric surgery" than vaccinate their kids. This book is helpful in tying the various conspiracies together and showing how so many of them take a hard right turn, like all these people whose defining belief is "I have the right to believe anything I want, no matter how stupid and harmful it is" all end up in the same place.

Highly recommended for anyone curious about cults, the crunchy wellness/right wing overlap, Lemuria, and the sad saga of Love Has Won. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a review copy.

This is a fantastic write up not only of the Love Has One/Mother God cult, but also of a history of the American New Age movement going all the way back to spiritualism and Madame Blavatsky, and showing the stark connections to White Supremacy and the modern alt right movement. As someone who has been deeply fascinated and horrified by QAnon/pastel QAnon and how it indoctrinates people though various means, and I really liked the way Sottile linked it all together to American New Age practices and influencers. Really scary stuff but super relevant, unfortunately. Definitely a must read if you are interested in cults and spiritual abuse and manipulation.

You can say many things about Leah Sottile's Blazing Eye Sees All, but you certainly cannot call it boring. Sottile takes a look at the cult, Love Has won, New Age Spiritualism, Lemuria, and a who's who of spiritual charlatans. I'm about to spill a lot of ink parsing out what is in this book. Ultimately, you need to ask yourself this question if you are deciding whether or not to read it. If you are okay with being entertained while not necessarily feeling fully informed, then you should read this book. If an author's inability to truly examine a subject with a critical eye is a requirement for you, then you should skip it.

Love Has Won, and really its leader Amy Carlson, is the main subject of the narrative. Love Has Won is based in....well, it kinda follows the philosophy of....Amy was kinda....well, I have now read a book and watched a documentary on Love Has Won and damn if I still can't explain it. Amy thought she was God. More specifically, she was "Mother God" and she had a succession of "Father Gods". She also drank colloidal silver to the point she turned blue. See, told you that you would be entertained.

There are numerous tangents off of the Love Has Won story line. Some have very clear connections like the spiritual charlatan that Amy claimed she was in a previous life. There are other very tenuous threads which Sottile follows briefly. At times, Sottile will also try to shoehorn misogyny into the story. I felt like none of these things really helped me understand Amy and Love Has Won. Also, none of them were investigated enough to convince me of anything really. That said, they were interesting diversions.

It must be said as well that I saw a long documentary on Love Has Won before the book. On one hand, it made me primed to enjoy the book. On the other hand, I could tell how much was left out of this book which could have been used. The tangents and diversions should have been replaced with more on the cult in the attempt to really shed some light on what was going on there. In the last few chapters, Sottile gets to interview Amy's children and these chapters are riveting. I wanted more, but alas, I had to hear more about Lemuria. It's a problem when a non-fiction book gets a bit too focused on the fictional ideas of the story instead of the people at the center of it.

In the end, I wasn't mad at Blazing Eye Sees All, but there are so many places where it plainly could have been better. The choice is yours whether it's a journey you want to take.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Grand Central Publishing.)