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Religious groups numbering no more than 1,000 members at the height of their popularity seldom merit a full-length scholarly monograph, but the Branch Davidian sect - infamously led by Vernon Howell, aka David Koresh - attracted worldwide interest when officers first raided the group's Waco, Texas, facilities in February 1993 and, nearly two months later, a billow of smoke and flames engulfed their 'Mt Carmel' compound. More than eighty people died in the failed operation, including numerous children. The subsequent bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh - precisely two years after the fire in Waco - further established the Branch Davidians as archetypes of modern Christian millennialism. Kenneth Newport's carefully-documented study explores how more than five decades of incremental theological developments led to the catastrophic demise of the Branch Davidian community (though a few, scattered adherents remain alive today). The Branch Davidians of Waco reconstructs the theological milieu of these widely controversial events, but Newport's distinctive contribution to scholarship...