Product Description

Them: Adventures with Extremists is a romp into the heart of darkness involving 12-foot lizard-men, PR-conscious Ku Klux Klansmen, Ian Paisley, Hollywood limousines, the legend of Ruby Ridge, Noam Chomsky, a harem of kidnapped sex slaves, David Icke, and Nicolae Ceausescu's shoes. While Jon Ronson attemps to locate the secret room, he is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp, and witnesses CEOs and leading politicians undertake a bizarre pagan owl ritual in the forests of Northern California. He also learns some alarming things about the looking-glass world of them and us. Are the extremists right? Or has he become one of Them? This is a fascinating investigation into extremists of every stripe.

'A funny and compulsively readable picaresque adventure through a paranoid shadow world' Louis Theroux, Guardian

'Very entertaining and very frightening' Q magazine

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2102 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Journalist and broadcaster Jon Ronson's first book Them: Adventures With Extremists is a mostly hilarious, occasionally chastening romp through the shadowy world of paranoid conspiracists. It proves a neat conceit. Ronson, a consummate faux-naïf, inevitably treads similar ground to Louis Theroux, though perhaps with a lighter, more disingenuous patter, which sustains him in encounters that veer from the extraordinary to the mundane at dizzying pace, and blur the space between. He meets Omar, the infuriatingly likeable Islamic fundamentalist organising a jihad from a North London semi, despite a more real struggle with the reprographic world, and PR-conscious Klu Klux Klan leader, Thom Robb, who unaccountably has Jewish mannerisms. Others who allow Ronson to share a window in the life, and possibly into their soul, include David Icke, still believing that the world's ruling elite are descended from reptiles (no, really), Dr Ian Paisley, and Tony Kaye, a Hollywood director, determined to sabotage his own movie, American History X, rather than see it publicly released without his approval. These are easy pickings, but Ronson picks them with unobtrusive and gentle irony.

His main mission, though, is to track down the Bilderberg Group, who reputedly comprise the world's leading figures, and who, it is believed by the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and "Soho Bomber" David Copeland, want to enforce global capitalism. As if. However, the alleged sighting of Peter Mandelson, attending a Bilderberg gathering, surely portends more for the British reader. Ronson's escapades--"I am a humorous journalist out of my depth", he informs the British Embassy in Portugal when his car is tailed--uncovers more truth than one would expect, though none greater than the depressing but crushingly realistic notion that even the most powerful public figures are, at play, little more than preppies or undergraduates, who enjoy worshipping owl effigies, wearing false breasts and urinating in public. Luckily, Ronson tires of the corkscrewing paranoia and subterfuge before the reader, leaving a rich impression of a world affirmingly varied and absurd, if endearingly familiar. But, having attended a Bilderberg meeting, perhaps he would, wouldn't he?--David Vincent

Review
'A funny and compulsively readable picaresque adventure through a paranoid shadow world' Louis Theroux, Guardian; 'Very entertaining and very frightening' Q magazine

About the Author
Jon Ronson was born in 1967. He is an award-winning film maker and writer who has contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines across the world, including The Times, Elle, The Evening Standard, The Independent, The Village Voice and many others. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Wry, impassioned, frightening and thoroughly readable
Who would've predicted it? I imagine that's just about as pertinent a question as can be applied to Them. Who would have predicted that a 5-year documentary of myriad extremist groups would culminate, at least if not internally, then externally, in the most violent of thematic bookends: the World Trade Centre horror? Who could have predicted that Jon Ronson's strange acquaintanceship with Omar Bakri who, last century, proclaimed himself Osama Bin Laden's man in Britain, would, in 2001, take on such fearsome new dimensions. I don't think, certainly, that Jon Ronson would have predicted it. But, possibly, the extremists Jon adventures with in this wry-yet-shocking book would have guessed. Because, as this series of fair-handed portraits continually demonstrates, extremist groups are reacting against something. They may have wrong the level or the participants (individual, or group, sector, race) of a conspiracy, but they do not make up the whole story. There are conspiracy theories because there are conspiracies. Extremists shout and bawl, often in distasteful and, frankly, bizarre terms about conspiracies, only because people are apt to conspire.

The book is split into chapters, which, usually, take one extremist group at a time. Occasionally several chapters link the threads of one conspiracy, but essentially Ronson provides digestible snapshots of a wide range of beliefs and fears. The buffet approach can possibly leave you short-changed in terms of full-blown analysis, but the book isn't really concerned with providing that. Instead, what the reader gets is an extremely entertaining read - Ronson being about as charming and witty guide as any tourist could want, especially, it soon becomes clear, when traversing some fairly odd ground - but also one that allows the humanity of the extremists to be viewed. As individuals, these are very often personable enough people. They are far from crazed, even if more frequently they stick with worrying fastness to their eccentricity and their sometimes indefensible beliefs.

But it is not just the extremists who are being revealed here. The British press, the countless groups proclaiming to protect New York Jews from anti-Semitism, the financiers, the entrepreneurs, the businessmen and politicians of the (secretly world-ruling, according the conspiracists; privately world-benefiting, according to them) Bilderberg group, all come in for the sort of gentle, self-effacing, but often deceptively impassioned probing Ronson specialises in. He doesn't ever become one of them, though he worries about it, and I doubt many of the readers of this book will either, but all of us together, author and audience alike, are, by the final pages, far slower to jump to conclusions and far quicker to accept that They might have a bit of a point.

You HAVE To Read This Book
'Them' is an astonishing piece of journalism, which I picked up on recommendation and read without budging from the sofa in a day. It's often said journalists are lazy. Not here. Ronson has a talent for snouting out the absurd, and the brass cojones to head straight for its source. How he got these figures to let him shadow them is every bit as mystifying as the Bilderberg group.

The result is a wonderfully funny, and often frightening read. It strips our preconceptions of these bizarre, extremist figureheads and reveals them at their most naked. It exposes their hypocrisies, eccentricities, motives, beliefs, and pettiness, without being cruel. Particularly entertaining is the chapter on travelling through Camaroon with the terrifying Reverend Ian Paisley. It is the snippets of infantile, eavesdropped conversation that makes 'Them' such a shocking, hysterical, and orginal read. Ronson writes clearly, subtly, and sews the plot together nicely on the 'secret-room' thread.

I laughed out loud all day at these remarkable revelations. Here is a book that will change how you look at the world.

Where 12 ft. lizards fear to tred
Global politics are terrifying, and lets face it there's not a lot of laughing matter there. It is always a welcome relief to have your worst paranoid fears confirmed with a comic touch.
As Ronson himself acknowledges he is:
"Essentially a humorous journalist...out of my depth."
As he bumbles his way through meetings with powerful (and sometimes several planets short of a solar system) people you can see that Ronson's self-depreciating interview style has paid dividends where hardened news hacks fail. It is really important to say at this point that if half of the things he uncovers are true then we should be very, very worried. My only slight reservation was a feeling that in an effort to remain impartial to his subject matter, you never got to hear Ronson's own opinion....you make up your own mind! Dark, disturbing, and very funny.