I "enjoyed" the first half of the book.

Everyone has heard of Jim Jones and the Jonestown mass suicide. However I don't think many people, my age, know the full story.

The funny thing is that his early days of church on the mainland USA feels eerily close to a church that I used to attend. I'm pretty sure I would have joined his church/cult had I encountered it at the right time.

One thing that shocked me is that Christians often trust their pastors implicitly. Jim Jones was extreme and used techniques more akin to false psychic healers to grow his congregation. Those outside of his inner circle believed that his healings were true.

The inner circle allowed his lies to proliferate because they believed in his ultimate secret mission of a creating a socialist paradise.

This is a really dangerous combination, a secret ideology, fake mystical signs and wonders plus a cult like religion.

This covered the first half of the book. Even "respectable" christian preachers thought Jim Jones was a socially conscious preacher who fought for integration and equity even after the end of the cult.

The second half of the book describes the move to Guyana, how that happened and the descent into madness. It's really shocking, much worse than I knew or expected. It gets pretty shocking towards the end and makes for uncomfortable reading.

On reading this book I wondered if Jim Jones suffered from the same delusions that Orson Welles described; that people who practice fake physic activities start to believe their own bullshit. When they accidentally guess what people are thinking, or what is meaningful to strangers, they start to believe that they really have become psychic or that god has told the that information.

Who knows. I think that cult leader is a kind of mental illness that is attractive to other people to follow.

An eminently interesting book, a perfect description of cult creation and it's consequences though probably difficult to comprehend fully unless you know similar Christian churches.