Actually, is quite informative... - Rated 
And regarding the comments below, it's a good thing that you are not a hemophiliac - oh, wait! The Watchtower suddenly decided that it's okay to take in blood products if you have a blood disease! Hmmm! Can you please tell me where in the Bible it says WHOLE blood only? Oh, wait, the hemophiliac blood thing was a new truth! So it's okay! But how come my Bible hasn't changed? Oh, perhaps because I don't have the approved Watchtower version?
Very Informative - Rated 
As a disinterested observer of the Jehovah Witnesses' sect, I was both informed and fascinated by Reed's book. His greatest strength is the documentation of the sect from the mid 19th century Millerite movement to the formation of JW in 1931, and the subsequent centralization of power by the governing board. His research appears to be meticulous. Also well documented are the contradictions and changes in the board's policy and its failed prophesies. Secondly of interest are his personal experiences as he moves from ardent believer to outcast. As to why people join, he states that it is an emotional decision, not an intellectual one. (My very limited encounters with JWs leads me to believe they are intellectually short changed). A good, passionate yet well reasoned read.
A good look at a non-prophet organization - Rated
This book does a good job of explaining to people unfamiliar
with the Jehovah's Witnesses the amount of control the organization exerts upon its followers, controlling their lives to the point that they would refuse life saving medical treatment. False prophecies, history, and other interesting information about the organization is also
discussed. An up-to-date, informative, and entertaining book.
Jehovah's Witnesses' mind control and blood transfusions. - Rated
A Review of Blood on the Altar
Dave Mackmiller
Blood on the Altar: Confessions of a Jehovah's Witness Minister, by David A. Reed (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996) 285 pp.
The main focus of Blood on the Altar deals with the Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs) and their refusal to accept blood transfusions, even in the face of death. Much of the rest of the book deals with the 117-year history of the JWs and their plethora of scandals, failed prophesies, and contradictory biblical interpretations.
The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, which governs the JWs, loosely interprets an ancient Hebrew dietary restriction as God's injunction against blood transfusions. Genesis 9:4 says, "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat." (Oddly enough, during the 30's and 40's the JWs also interpreted this as a biblical ban on vaccinations.)
Although the JWs release no official mortality data, Reed calculates that between five and twelve thousand JW's die every year from refusing transfusions. But since they die quietly one by one, they don't make sensational headlines like the multiple deaths at Waco and Jonestown. The book is peppered with news clippings about JWs who died by refusing blood. For example, there's Bill Korinek, injured in a car crash,
Although growing weaker from loss of blood, Korinek steadfastly refused to accept a transfusion... The Mormon doctor pleaded with the young man's mother to authorize the treatment, but she replied, "I would rather see my boy dead and in the grave than see him violate Jehovah God's commandment against blood!" Korinek died shortly afterward.
Sadder yet are the accounts of babies and children who died because their parents felt they were doing Jehovah's will. Several times the doctors were able to get a court order to force a transfusion, but by then it was too late. Sometimes they were physically prevented by large groups of JWs guarding the patient. This is a recent tactic of the JWs, to send a "Hospital Liason Comittee" to watch over a dying member. A JW who is married to a non-believer may secretly sign over power-of-attorney to a church elder, who can then legally order blood withheld over the objections of the patient's family.
The JWs carry their ban on blood to absurd extremes. As a JW, you cannot even accept your own blood if it has been removed from your circulation. If your cat needed a blood transfusion and you allowed it, you would be sinning. You also could not use leeches for medical purposes, since you would be feeding them your blood. (They must panic at the sight of a mosquito!)
In 1967, they also interpreted Genesis 9:4 as prohibiting organ transplants. They decried them as "a short cut to cannibalistically chewing and eating human flesh." Then in 1980, the Watchtower stated, "There is no biblical command pointedly forbidding the taking in of other human tissue." Reed comments,
What of those who went blind refusing a cornea transplant during the thirteen-year ban? What of those who died refusing a kidney or other vital organ? No apologies were given to the suffering individuals still alive, nor to the JW families who lost loved ones. The prohibition on such medical procedures was quietly dropped and then no longer mentioned, as if it had never been.
Since the Watchtower Society has reversed itself on transplants and vaccinations, why not drop the ban on blood? Reed speculates that it "may be a case of holding a tiger by the tail: how can they let go after so many have died?"
As a former JW myself, I found Reed 's account fascinating. He quotes from JW literature dating back to 1877, exposing teachings that even modern day JWs would find absurd. For example, they asserted for decades that measurements of the Great Pyramid of Giza represented a chronology predicting Christ's return (a theory probably stolen from the Mormans). They also claimed to know God's address: the star Alcyone in the Pleiades cluster.
Reed also details his own conversion and the subtle yet powerful mind-control that the JWs exert. He describes his fall from grace over "an inch of hair" and his wife's wearing of pantsuits. (JWs maintain a strictly 50's conservative dress code.) There is a fascinating mind-control story about his encounter with a JW canvassing at his front door shortly after he left the cult. She talked about Revelations and the "great crowd" of JWs who would live forever on earth instead of heaven. He asked her to read from Revelations 19:1,
She read, "After these things I heard what was a loud voice of a great crowd in heaven..." Then I asked her where the verse located the great crowd. "On earth," she replied. So I had her read it again, this time interrupting her after she read the words, "great crowd in heaven." Again I asked her where the verse located the great crowd. And again she answered, "On earth." So I pointed to the verse in her Bible and asked her, "But what is that word there - the last word you read?" "It says 'heaven,' " she finally acknowledged, immediately adding, "but the great crowd is on earth." Then she explained, "You don't understand. We have men at our [Watchtower Society] headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, who explain the Bible to us."
Is it any wonder that people who are so tightly controlled by the Watchtower Society would gladly allow themselves to die over the Society's interpretation of some ancient Kosher dietary law?
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