4.5 stars

There are two services this book provides you. The first is that it lays out, very clearly, the entirety of Jim Jones and his career from start to finish. The information presented is through and incisive. You will come away with all the facts you need, which is all that most nonfiction books aspire to.

But the truly important thing this book does is it helps you to understand the members of the Peoples Temple. You see what there was in Jones's offerings that drew people in, and you understand why they stayed. I even found myself thinking, at several points in the book, that the community they created was accomplishing exactly what I want to accomplish politically and spiritually: they really were feeding the hungry, they really were helping the poorest of the poor, they really were creating a group that was committed to overcoming racism. They did a lot of good for the communities they were in, and it's easy to see why outsiders, especially San Fransisco political figures, accepted them for what they appeared to be on the surface.

But then of course there's all the other stuff Jones mixed in with that. The faked faith "healings," the degree of control he had over the members, the punishments and the sacrifices he demanded, the sexual abuse of the women in the church, the terrible way he treated his ever-faithful wife. A lot of it is horrifying, and yet I understood for the first time why people stayed anyway. I could imagine how they justified it all to themselves even as I was horrified by the things they went through. The book recreates Jones's paranoid worldview to the point that the mass suicide does seem like a natural outgrowth of everything that came before. It's all disturbing and all so human.