Paul Eli reviews Lawrence Wright's inside look at the workings of scientologists.
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"On a rainy morning in late September 2010," Lawrence Wright recounts in
"Going Clear," representatives of the Church of Scientology met in New York with
him and a number of his colleagues at the New Yorker, from David Remnick, the
magazine's editor, to its head of fact-checking and its in-house lawyer.
The Scientology delegation brought with them forty-eight three-ring binders
of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet, to respond to the
971 questions the checkers had posed. It was an impressive display. The binders
were labeled according to categories, such as "Disappearance of L. Ron Hubbard,"
"Tom Cruise," "Gold Base," and "Haggis's Involvement in Scientology." Davis
[Tommy Davis, a church hierarch close to Tom Cruise] emphasized that the church
had gone to extraordinary lengths to prepare for this meeting. "Frankly, the
only thing I can think that compares would be the presentation that we made in
the early 1990s to the IRS."
