The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple Hardcover – April 11, 2017

Very detailed and informative history of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple that he created. It’s a well written story of how Jones was able to form his church and, through his misinformation, lying and brainwashing, was able to convince over 900 people to commit suicide. Very sad and disturbing account, yet very well written.

This is a topic that I knew just a small amount about and this book really filled in the details for me. Like most people, the only part of the story I was really familiar with was the mass suicide/murder at the end. But this book put it in a context that explains a lot of what these people believed and how they though about the world and about Jones. The tragic ending takes up less than a third of the book and the author does a good job of starting from the beginning and telling the story of Jones as a child, his marriage to his long suffering wife as well as his early days as a pastor in Indianapolis. What is so interesting about this story is that if you did not know how it ended you would think that this was the story of a pastor who while a little strange and controlling had dedicated himself to helping the poor and the downtrodden in society and I got the impression that in the end he still felt he was doing this even if it was selfish and misguided in the extreme. If there is one shortcoming of this book I think it would have been nice to know what Jones's founders thought of him and why did some of them who had been with him since the beginning stay with him. What was it about his message ( that seemed to be constantly changing) that made it so alluring to some people. This author does a good job of placing the People's Temple in the context of the thought and political movements of the time especially the parts that talk about Jones's connection to Father Divine and his later involvement in San Francisco politics. This is a fascinating book and as the author point out it is unfortunate that the only way it is remembered by most people is by a bad joke about "drinking the Kool-aid ( it was actually Flavor-aid). This book is a fast and interesting read that would interest anyone who would like to know more about the story of Jim Jones and his followers or want insight into the inner workings of a cult works.

I knew extremely little about Jim Jones, Jonestown, or Peoples Temple before reading this book, so it was nice to get the full story right from the beginning. This book gives a very detailed and wide-ranging look at what was going on with Jim Jones and Peoples Temple and how it all ended and provides the perspective of multiple people who were involved; it's very comprehensive. I can't imagine that I would get a more well-rounded and thorough examination of these topics from another source. That said, the book is quite long and while it might be boring for some people, I found it to be quite readable and engaging. Definitely a very well-written book.

The events of November 18th, 1978, will soon be forty years in the past, and while the world is constantly reminded of the phrase "Don't drink the Kool-Aid" (meaning, don't blindly go along with something), hardly anyone, at least anyone I know, is aware of the tragic origins of this maxim. Jeff Guinn's latest book about the story behind this phrase is probably destined to be the final word on the most tragic event in American religious history. He has no ax to grind, and no hidden agenda to propagate. His book may begin with the horrific aftermath of November 18th, but he never forgets that this story is a process. Relatively little time is spent in "Jonestown", the name and place which subsumed what had always been Peoples Temple until November 18th, because this is a story that spans nearly thirty years, only the last two of which were spent in the jungle settlement in Guyana. No one joined a "cult". Some joined a progressive Pentecostal church in Indianapolis in 1952, led by an earnest young preacher with a gift for prophecy, miraculous healing and a passion for racial equality, and his equally earnest wife, both of whom shared a belief in "activist Christianity". Others joined a transplanted progressive church aligned with the Disciples of Christ in rural Ukiah, California in the mid 1960s, focused on "Apostolic Socialism",an interracial lifestyle, and community-wide social service programs. Hundreds of needy people received free welfare assistance, drug treatment, foster-care placement, and elder care in high quality church-run care homes. Others joined a black church located in inner-city San Francisco and Los Angeles, with a strong focus on Marcus Garvey-type "back to Africa" preaching, the social gospel, and racial justice, albeit led by a white minister who often said he wished he was black. Finally, young, ideaistic upper middle class whites, often familiar with the counter-culture and looking for ways to effect positive social change, joined a pseudo-socialist quasi-communal political organization which hid behind the mantle of religion in order to covertly bring as many people as it possibly could towards a belief in socialism. JIm Jones was all of these things to all of these disparate people. And members of all of these groups would die in Jonestown on November 18th, 1978, their trust, idealism, and good intentions utterly betrayed by the man who led them. If that's not the epitome of tragedy, I don't know what is.Guinn goes into much more detail than previous biographers into Jones's early life, highlighting the role of his mother, Lynetta, in fostering his outsize sense of self-importance with her own beliefs in her (and therefore, his) inherent greatness, reincarnation, and the absurdity of any belief in a "sky God", and the sense that everyone, from their neighbors in Lynn, Indiana to her husband's own family (who had been nothing but generous to her and received only disdain in return), were out to "get" her. These twin delusions of grandeur and paranoia would become the key hallmarks of Jones's personality. Guinn also uncovers the key role neighbor Myrtle Kennedy played in Jones' religious upbringing; introducing him to the bible and setting him up as a child preacher around the small town of Lynn, thus inadvertently setting him on the road to becoming a religious mastermind.Guinn was able to locate and interview members of the extended Jones family, many of whom had never agreed to an interview before. He also provides the clearest picture yet of Marceline, Jim Jones's long suffering wife and devout believer in activist Christianity. A typical product of respectable Republican middle class south central Indiana, Marceline wanted nothing more than to live a life serving others, which she did by becoming a nurse at Reid Memorial Hospital in Bloomington, and then, after meeting, falling in love with, and then marrying a young orderly named Jim Jones, whom she met while on staff, by serving as chief administrator of his new church's well run elder-care homes and soup kitchen. Guinn follows Marceline's ark from idealistic if conventional minister's wife, to second-in-command of a burgeoning religious movement, to mother of a growing "rainbow family" of adoptive children (only one of their children was biological), to an increasingly disillusioned but resigned woman forced to play "Mother" to Jones's "Father" as the Temple began it's insidious swing from respectable church to cult, to an essential bystander to the increasing horror as Jones and his chief mistresses prepare for a "last stand" in Jonestown as Concerned Relatives and a hostile media converge on the compound. Here, Guinn brilliantly outlines her tragedy as one of confusion and contradiction, a desire to stay to protect her children and a misguided belief that she could stop the "last stand" before it happened. It is at once both compelling and heartbreaking reading.There are many such stories in this book. We read of survivor Tim Carter's search for enlightenment, his finding community, a wife, and a newborn son, only to lose it all on November 18th. We read of Carolyn Layton's idealistic beliefs in a better world slowly morphing into a horrific echo-chamber for Jones' own delusions. We see shy, kind, introvert Maria Katsaris morph into a fanatical Jones loyalist willing to murder her own surrogate son on his orders. We read of desperate attempts to survive on November 18th, coupled the with fierce determination of others to make a statement to the world through mass suicide; "We died because you would not let us live in peace" Carolyn's sister Annie wrote as a coda to her final note, found by the side of her body, just before she drank flavor-aide laced with cyanide and put a bullet through her head. And Marceline's desperate screams for it all to stop even as hundreds of children died before her eyes, murdered by nurses she herself had trained. The tragedy is monumental, and Guinn captures it all with spare, succinct, and compassionate prose.In the end, if a full explanation for how a demagogue such as Jim Jones came to lead nearly a thousand people to their deaths 6,000 miles from home remains illusive, is is hardly the fault of Guinn, who spent four years and countless hours of research on this book. Despite all the survivor accounts and testimony found in the aftermath of Jonestown, the people who could really tell us what happened that afternoon are dust. They are mute forevermore. Guinn gives the how and why of the rise and fall of Peoples Temple his best guess, and I have to say, it is the most convincing I've read so far. This disparate group of people were led overtime to accept increasingly incredible things, surrounded by a siege mentality even before the move to Guyana, and conditioned by their own experiences even before arrival in the temple that hostile forces in the United States were out to oppress blacks (which was and is true) and persecute anyone who espoused beliefs in life-ways that rejected capitalism. By the time of the final white night, many were too exahusted, frightened, and terrorized to resist's Jones' assertion that "we be kind to children, and be kind to seniors, and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece". But many did resist. As Tim Carter reminds us, the so called "death tape" was pointed at Jones and his podium. . It doesn't record the screams of protest, the pandemonium of the death scene, the forced injections of the poison under duress.In the end, Guinn paints a portrait of a movement that could have done (and did do) great things, but which was led astray by the ambition and megalomania of it's leader. It is a portrait of human idealism and human gullibility writ large. And after you read it, you will never, ever utter the phrase "they drank the Kool-Aide" ever again. As Guinn points out, they didn't, neither literally or figuratively.

This book is an easy and pleasurable read. The anecdotes are many. The personalities and motivations are remarkable. An epic story very well told.

Essencial para entender as radicalizações atuais. Pessoas procurando guias filhos e destruindo sua vida, se isolando da família e da realidade. Devemos pensar bem se coisas assim e meditar sobre o mundo atual da radicalização por líderes carismáticos doentios e sem empatia.

👍🏻

This is a captivating story. I knew some of the detail of the Jonestown incident before I bought the book so was a bit apprehensive that I might be going over stuff I already knew. I was wrong.The author provides a huge amount of detail about the earlier part of the Peoples Temple and Jim Jones and at no point does it get boring. I've read biographies about infamous individuals tied to events and the author has had to pad out the book with boring irrelevant details. Not in this case, at no point does it feel padded out and it's an absolute page turner.In the era where Netflix and others are creating some fantastic true crime dramas, this feels like the written word equivalent. A factual event told by a brilliant story teller, as good as any made up story.

Scritto in maniera egregia ed appassionante con un insight molto profondo, difficile staccarsi una volta iniziato, una splendida compagnia in quattro giorni tappato in casa per Influenza!