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  • The Colony

  • Faith and Blood in a Promised Land
  • By: Sally Denton
  • Narrated by: Ann Richardson
  • Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
  • 3.7 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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The Colony

By: Sally Denton
Narrated by: Ann Richardson
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Publisher's Summary

On the morning of November 4, 2019, a caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities-fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century. The massacre produced international headlines for weeks, and prompted President Donald Trump to threaten to send in the US Army.

In The Colony, Sally Denton delves into the complex story of the LeBaron clan. Their homestead—Colonia LeBaron—is a portal into the past, a place that offers a glimpse of life within a polygamous community on an arid and dangerous frontier in the mid-1800s, though with smartphones and machine guns. Rooting her narrative in written sources as well as interviews with anonymous women from LeBaron itself, Denton unfolds an epic, disturbing tale that spans the first polygamist emigrations to Mexico through the LeBarons' internal blood feud in the 1970s and up to the family's recent alliance with the NXIVM sex cult, whose now-imprisoned leader, Keith Raniere, may have based his practices on the society he witnessed in Colonia LeBaron.

©2022 Sally Denton (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

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Not what I expect

So this is the third book I have read about the LeBaron cult. This one was a little bit different in the sense that it was written very recently after the 2019 massacre of three women and their children in Mexico. Part of the book explores this massacre and the politics behind it and looks at some of the different theories about who was responsible for the massacre, the rest of the book is a pretty detailed history of the LeBaron group and also Mormonism and it spread from Joseph Smith.

I actually found the historic part probably more interesting than the recent part, it's amazing how quickly this quasi religion took off and the reason I say quasi religion is not to be distracted to the Mormon religion or the Latter Day Saints, but how it was perverted into this way of controlling women and controlling people with money, power, sex and marriage. I particularly enjoyed how the author showcased two women who came to America from both Denmark and the UK and how their stories unfolded after joining the Mormon movement.

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