About book A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story Of Hope, Deception, And Survival At Jonestown (2011)
Everyone has heard about Jonestown - the cult of death. It is one of the biggest non state sponsored mass murder-suicide that took place in the previous century. This book is an attempt to humanise the victims of the tragedy and put their motives and desires in joining Jim Jones in perspective. The author has used FBI files, audio recordings from Jonestown and personal memoirs extensively in her research.The research was extensive and the story is told in a narrative format. Though interestingly written, the writing was too haphazard. The book has a few protagonists but their stories are all mixed up and interspersed with other things in between. The main problem, however, is that there are too many characters and the author does not take enough time to build them up gradually so that we would remember them properly. She would mention a certain person doing something in one place and then go on to something else, then after a few pages would refer to the person again, by which time I had forgotten who it was. Her practice of referring to people by their first names and last names at different times simply just added to the confusion. It was only at the very end that I realised that there were two Ediths in the story! The author makes good on her promise to humanise some of the people who survived / died in Jonestown, mainly by showing why they felt attracted to the cult in the first place and how they wanted out but were unable to escape. But even though this is a story of mass murder, there were people there who carried out Jones' orders, guarded him, helped him and were brutal to others on his orders. There were actually people on patrol while the murders/suicides were being carried out. Why were these people not rebelling? This is something the author did not explain, which makes the humanisation / understanding of these people incomplete for me. That said, this is a comprehensive history of Jonestown and a must-read for everyone interested in the incident. The excerpts taken from personal memoirs are quite intriguing as are the verbatim transcriptions of the Jonestown audio tapes. I also appreciated that the author clearly conveyed that the false freedom to practice oppressive religions was one of the main reasons for this tragedy. The US government refused to look into the matter in the beginning citing 'freedom' until it was too late. The Guyana government was too corrupt and could not have cared if a bunch of Americans lived, died or were enslaved. I can only imagine how the survivors of this tragedy dealt with their pain. I hope they found peace and joy at some point in their lives. I loved this book. I'm from Indiana and when I was growing up I felt like I heard a lot about Jim Jones and kind of always had a fascination about the whole Jonestown incident. I knew the gist of the story but I had never really placed myself in the shoes of the people that were involved in People's Temple. Julia Scheeres does a fantastic job of giving great insight into why people would join this organization and it really made the situation much more understandable. I thought it was so interesting and it made me search out more information online. I ended up watching the PBS Jonestown documentary, which was much more upsetting after reading the book. The one thing I regret is that before I finished the book I stumbled across a list of survivors so I already knew who in the book got out alive :( Wonderful book, was very glad I read it.
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Amazing and horrifying depiction of what happened to the followers of jim Jones.
—Wilma
oh man. this is hard work, but lord is it worth it.
—sam123
