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 is in placing Branch Davidianism within a historical and theological trajectory stemming from the 1844 Millerites in America. The Seventh-day Adventist Church emerged out of the ‘great disappointment’ that followed Miller's failed prediction of the second coming of Christ. The early twentieth century witnessed the development of a new ‘Davidian’ movement hoping to reform the Seventh-day Adventists under the leadership of Victor Houteff. Houteff established the original (‘old’) Mt Carmel community in Waco and predicted the violent persecution that would face God's faithful in the anticipated end of history. Houteff's death and his wife's subsequent (failed) prophecy of the end of times diminished the group's following, but the emergence of a new prophet – Ben Roden, the self-proclaimed ‘Branch’ – led to a final stage of development: the Branch Davidians were ‘an offshoot of an offshoot’ of Seventh-day Adventism (notably, both groups focused their evangelistic/recruitment efforts primarily among Seventh-day Adventists). David Koresh's leadership and status as a prophet in the Branch Davidian community emerged during the mid-1980s under the tutelage of Ben Roden's wife Lois, who preached a uniquely feminist understanding of the Holy Spirit and persisted in the notion of her predecessors that ‘the remnant would be baptized by fire’ (p. 166). Koresh's teachings relied on a complex string of typological biblical interpretations of the Old Testament prophets and, especially, the Book of Revelation. Koresh further initiated the ‘new light’ doctrine that allowed him – as one bearing an apparently ontological relationship to Christ (p. 225) – exclusive sexual access to the women of the community (including both married women and some prepubescent girls) in order to establish the twenty-four elders of Revelation. By the time Newport turns to the failed siege and eventual fire that killed the majority of the Branch Davidians, he has already made a convincing case (though sometimes based on thought processes that may never be fully ascertained) that some of the inhabitants of Waco expected to die a violent death, even a literal baptism of fire. Newport thereby debunks the simplistic, commonplace notion that the Branch Davidians were nothing more than a group of blindly ‘duped followers who [were] either too stupid or too brainwashed to see through the manipulative tactics of their egocentric leader’ (p. 203). Branch Davidianism was a movement composed of a unified, remnant community driven by fantastic, typological interpretations of apocalyptic literature. In the end, the beliefs of the remnant community (rather than the leadership of a single individual) proved to be a stronger bond than the US government anticipated. A preexisting theology made the government siege seem to align with biblical prophecies and, tragically, led the Branch Davidians to set the very fires that smothered the compound: