As a founder member of the 1960s New York counterculture music and poetry collective the Fugs, Ed Sanders was perhaps uniquely placed to write an intimate history of the circumstances enabling mass-murderer Charles Manson and his acolytes to commit one of the most bizarre and horrific crimes in California criminal history. In THE FAMILY, his remarkable account of the events leading up to the 1969 Sharon Tate murders in Los Angeles, Sanders combines his knowledge of the '60s underground with a hard-nosed and unerring instinct for detecting and exposing the charlatanry and fraud at the root of Manson's cult of personality. With painstaking attention to detail and impressive research skills, Sanders dissects the origins of Manson's criminal psyche and its nurture in the US penal system, recounting the ways the charismatic killer used his jailhouse education to con his followers, and in some cases their relatives, into believing the myth of his omnipotence. With the air of a seasoned magician laying bare a huckster's carnival tricks, Sanders's matter-of-fact, deadpan prose exposes the lethal combination of Manson's criminal cunning and the naïveté of his disciples in the Family, which found macabre fruition in the horrific scenes of carnage at the Tate house on Cielo Drive.