Guinn offers what might be the most complete picture to date of this tragic saga, and of the man who engineered it ... The result is a disturbing portrait of evil — and a compassionate memorial to those taken in by Jones’ malign charisma.
A bulldog of an investigator, Guinn has tracked down disenchanted ex-cult members and the few survivors of Jonestown, including several of Jones’s sons who happened to be away on the community’s last day. The result is a thoroughly readable, thoroughly chilling account of a brilliant con man and his all-too vulnerable prey. If weak on explanations of what made the man and his victims tick, it generates a bizarre — dare I say Manson-like? — magnetic force that pulls the reader through its many pages. Noir thriller morphs into horror story.
Guinn is a master storyteller with a unique expertise in murderous psychotics. The book reads like a thriller, each page forcing your attention to the next as the Peoples Temple slowly slides from groundbreaking progressivism toward madness.
Guinn’s reporting is fully rounded; he unearths details to show all sides of Jones the leader, a firebrand who helped to integrate Indianapolis years before U.S. desegregation law, who established social service programs for drug addiction, poverty and battered women. Former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown once introduced Jones as an 'American Gandhi.' What lesson Guinn imparts in 500 jungle-dense pages may have been summed up in two lines by Bob Dylan: 'Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parkin’ meters.' Yet only a cynic would dismiss this narrative as useless. The Jonestown massacre opened eyes wide to the nihilism of cults — and, perhaps, to the limits of charisma.
Guinn’s book, which follows Jones from his birth in Indiana to that last stand in Jonestown, is an attempt to explain how the preacher, a Marxist who studied Gandhi and committed himself to fighting racism and improving people’s lives, wound up becoming a man who ordered beatings and confinements for those who disobeyed him … His account of Jonestown, too, seems driven by an effort to make sense of what is by most standards a senseless situation. This is a strength as well as a weakness … Guinn occasionally overpsychologizes his subject, as if any childhood experience—a fascination with Hitler, an unpopular mother—could explain why Jim Jones became Jim Jones. This is a common trap—seeing authoritarian groups as existing within a vacuum and explaining them through the particular pathologies and charisma of their leaders. But that’s exactly what Jim Jones wanted: to exist inside a bubble that was entirely within his control.
...the definitive back story on cult leader Jim Jones' rise to power ... This is so much more than a biography of a minister-turned-megalomaniac. It's a chronicle of the times, when people grasped at hope and happiness in unexpected places. And it's a chilling portrait of a man who, when the curtain was dropping on his slice of heaven, took everyone down with him.
There’s plenty of grotesquerie in the story, from Jones’s faith-healing with confederates and chicken guts to his sexual predations on followers, his attempts to relocate the church to the Soviet Union, the beatings he meted out, and the climactic poisoning of his flock with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. But Guinn probes the deeper mystery of Jones’s hold over his abused disciples, part personal magnetism and part genuine idealism ... Guinn’s exhaustive research, shrewd analysis, and engaging prose illuminate a monstrous yet tragic figure—and the motives of those who lost their souls to him.
...a searing account of what has since become a byword for religious cultism ... Guinn does an excellent job of following Jones to the roots: a rural loner who became a genuine advocate for poor African-Americans, a searcher with a long interest in building a safe harbor for his followers, and an all-around strange person with an endless appetite for drugs and decidedly un-Christian patterns of behavior. A vivid, fascinating revisitation of a time and series of episodes fast receding into history even as their forgotten survivors still walk among us.
