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“A gripping account of how decent people can be taken in by a charismatic and crazed tyrant” (The New York Times Book Review).
In 1954, a past or named Jim Jones opened a church in Indianapolis called Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church. He was a charismatic preacher with idealistic beliefs, and he quickly filled his pews with an audience eager to hear his sermons on social justice. As Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers leaned on each other to recapture the sense of equality that had drawn them to his church. But even as the congregation thrived, Jones made it increasingly difficult for members to leave. By the time Jones moved his congregation to a remote jungle in Guyana and the U.S. government began to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late.
A Thousand Lives is the story of Jonestown as it has never been told. New York Times bestselling author Julia Scheeres drew from tens of thousands of recently declassified FBI documents and audiotapes, as well as rare videos and interviews, to piece together an unprecedented and compelling history of the doomed camp, focusing on the people who lived there.
The people who built Jonestown wanted to forge a better life for themselves and their children. In South America, however, they found themselves trapped in Jonestown and cut off from the outside world as their leader goaded them toward committing “revolutionary suicide” and deprived them of food, sleep, and hope. Vividly written and impossible to forget, A Thousand Lives is a story of blind loyalty and daring escapes, of corrupted ideals and senseless, haunting loss.
- Sales Rank: #162167 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Free Press
- Published on: 2012-11-13
- Released on: 2012-11-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"Riveting...You will not be able to look away. " --"The San Francisco Chronicle"
"Julia Scheeres's book sheds startling new light on this murky, mini-chapter of contemporary history....the narrative is [a] compelling...psychological mystery." --"The Wall Street Journal"
"Scheeres shows great compassion and journalistic skill in reconstructing Jonestown's last months and the lives of many Temple members (including a few survivors)...["A Thousand Lives" is a] well-written, disturbing tale of faith and evil." --"Kirkus"
"Jonestown has become a grim metaphor for blind obedience--for fanaticism without regard to consequences. In the aptly titled" A Thousand Lives", Julia Scheeres captures the humanity within this terrible story, vividly depicting individuals trapped in a vortex of hope and fear, faith and loss of faith, not to mention the changes sweeping America in the 1960s and '70s. She makes their journeys to that unfathomable tragedy all too real; what was truly incredible, she shows, was the escape from death by a tiny handful of survivors. Drawing on a mountain of sources compiled and recently released by the FBI, she changes forever the way we think about this dark chapter of our history."--T.J. Stiles, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbil"t
"Chilling and heart-wrenching, this is a brilliant testament to Jones's victims, so many of whom were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time." --"Publisher's Weekly", starred review
"For those who can picture only the gory end of Jonestown, Julia Scheeres offers a heartbreaking and often inspiring glimpse of what might have been. Her masterfully told and exhaustively researched "A Thousand Lives" should stand not only as the definitive word on Jones' horrific machinations, but on the utopian dreams of a bygone generation. A worthy follow-up to her superb memoir, "Jesus Land"." --Tom Barbash, author of "On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal"
"How do you tell a new story about Jim Jones and his followers, when everyone knows how it ends? ...Julia Scheeres' riveting A" Thousand Lives" gives us reason to look again. " --"Miami He"rald
"The first solid history of the Temple...less a warning about the dangers of religosity than a clear headed chronology." --"San Francisco" magazine
"Julia Scheeres' "A Thousand Lives"... tells the tragic tale of Jonestown -- in its way, a peculiarly American apocalypse." --"L.A. Times"
"The definitive book on Jonestown and the Danse Macabre of suicide and murder orchestrated by mad Jim Jones. Julia Scheeres takes us by the hand and leads us gently, inexorably, into the darkness." -Tim Cahill, author of "Lost in My Own Backyard"
From the Inside Flap
Had I walked by 1859 Geary Boulevard in San Francisco when Peoples Temple was in full swing, I certainly would have been drawn to the doorway.
I grew up in a strict Christian family with an adopted black brother; race and religion were the dominant themes of my childhood. In our small Indiana town, David and I often felt self-conscious walking down the street together. Strangers scowled at us, and sometimes called us names. I wrote about the challenges of our relationship in my memoir, Jesus Land.
Suffice it to say, David and I would have been thrilled and amazed by Peoples Temple, a church where blacks and whites worshipped side by side, the preacher taught social justice instead of damnation, and the gospel choir transported the congregation to a loftier realm. We longed for such a place.
Unfortunately, the laudable aspects of Peoples Temple have been forgotten in the horrifying wake of Jonestown.
I stumbled onto writing this book by accident. I was writing a satirical novel about a charismatic preacher who takes over a fictional Indiana town, when I remembered Jim Jones was from Indiana, and Googled him. I learned that the FBI had released fifty thousand pages of documents, including diaries, meeting notes, and crop reports, as well as one thousand audiotapes that agents found in Jonestown after the massacre, and that no one had used this material to write a comprehensive history of the doomed community. Once I started digging through the files, I couldn't tear myself away.
It was easy to set my novel aside. I believe that true stories are more powerful, in a meaningful, existential way, than made-up ones. Learning about other peoples' lives somehow puts one's own life in sharper relief.
Aside from race and religion, there were other elements of the Peoples Temple story that resonated with me. When David and I were teenagers, our parents sent us to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic that had some uncanny parallels with Jonestown. I could empathize with the residents' sense of isolation and desperation.
You won't find the word cult in this book, unless I'm directly citing a source that uses the word. My aim here is to help readers understand the reasons that people were drawn to Jim Jones and his church, and how so many of them ended up dying in a mass-murder suicide on November 18, 1978. The word cult only discourages intellectual curiosity and empathy. As one survivor told me, nobody joins a cult.
To date, the Jonestown canon has veered between sensational media accounts and narrow academic studies. In this book, I endeavor to tell the Jonestown story on a grander, more human, scale.
Julia Scheeres
Berkeley, California, March 24, 2011
About the Author
Julia Scheeres is the author of New York Times bestselling memoir Jesus Land. She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two daughters.
Most helpful customer reviews
46 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
Compassion that increases the horror in this history
By Kurt Conner
Like many people born in 1980 or later, I grew up with a vague notion of Jonestown as a weird town in a jungle where a bunch of people in a cult drank poison Kool-Aid and died. I use the term "drink the Kool-Aid" when I refer to someone completely buying in to an idea or a cause. But until I read this book, I never really knew what Jonestown was all about.
Scheeres provides a service in this book, both as a skillful historian and as a compassionate human being. She synthesizes hours of audio recordings and written documents into a gut-wrenching tragedy that will linger with the reader. The true strength of her work is the constant tension between the hope of the individual characters and the inevitable doom that presses down on every page. Scheeres truly loves the victims of the massacre, and she is clearly determined to present them in sympathetic ways, sharing stories of simple people who came to Peoples Temple because it offered real racial integration, miraculous healings, and loving community. They believed in a socialism that affirmed the value of every human being, and they were willing to sign away all of their possessions for the cause.
As the group developed, though, things got darker, and Scheeres brings in an impressive level of detail in her examples. She writes about demonstrably fake "healings" and sham "assassination attempts" that Jones fabricated to make his followers feel persecuted by outsiders. There are heart-dropping scenes when church members are forced to sign blank pieces of paper, knowing that if they desert their communities, then the church leaders will type confessions (to murder, child molestation, or any other crimes) and deliver them to authorities. Jones also twists the spiritual bases of his organization when he literally stomps on Bibles onstage and declares himself God.
By the time the community moves to a compound in Guyana, Scheeres has found a comfortable rhythm, increasing the tension like a horror movie as the inevitable massacre swirls in a tightening band around the village. Jones reads about "revolutionary suicide" and completely misinterprets the term, missing the idea of "making progress for a revolutionary cause, even though it results in your death" and creating a moronic "kill yourself and leave a mean note" kind of definition. He insists that his community is being hunted by outsiders because of their commitment to socialism, while he predictably lounges in an air-conditioned drug-induced haze as his people sweat and starve. His obsession with death strangles his people, as their objections are worn down by hunger, fear, isolation, sleeplessness, and dehumanizing punishments for disloyalty.
Around this point in the narrative, the reader will surely have noticed that most of Scheeres' tale is based on facts from official documents and recordings. Scheeres only presents a few point-of-view characters to share their observations of daily life. While this focus seems troubling at first, the reader will come to realize that the main characters are so few because everyone else is going to die a horrible death in the jungle. It is a terrifying experience, and the narrative thunders toward its macabre conclusion with an intense power.
This book is a complex treasure, a road to hell paved with unapologetically noble intentions, and Scheeres has accomplished a great feat with it. She never loses her grasp of the humanity of her characters in the pursuit of her plot to its inevitable bloody conclusion. She will break your heart in the end, but only because she has worked so hard to win your heart in the first place.
35 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Compelling
By Thom
As a young survivor of this tragedy (17 years of age at the time), I found Julia Sheere's ability to summarize and tell the events to be quite compelling. I myself who was there, learned a great deal more of the inside workings and manipulations which occurred.
I am finally satisfied some body such as Julia took hold of the history of events and told them in such a manner to express we went to Jones Town - Because we had dreams of a better life! Not to die for some satanical, egomaniac!
Thank you Julia!
Thom Bogue
33 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Powerful and disturbing
By LMS
This is one of those books that you don't read for pleasure. To say that what happened at Jonestone was a tragedy is an understatement of incredible proportion. That goes without saying. Even though I once watched a documentary on television about Jonestown, I didn't know much about it. (I was only 2 years old in 1978). As I watched that documentary, I remember thinking "Why didn't they just leave?" This book helped me realize that the answer to that question is far more complex than it seems. The people at Jonestown left the United States in search of a dream. They wanted to live in a utopia of racial equality and harmony. By the time they realized just how dangerous and unstable Jim Jones really was, the settlement had become pretty much like a concentration camp. It can be easy to judge people who get involved with cults as stupid and naive. We tell ourselves that we would never get into a situation like that. But I think reality is that all humans need to believe in something. I think if the circumstances were right, anyone could be duped by a cult. That is why books like this are so important. I think it is so important to recognize the warning signs of a cult and to be proactive. Cult leaders like Jim Jones will often brainwash their followers, control them through brainwashing and some type of abuse, and isolate them from family and friends. I hope that people will read books like this and that something good will eventually come out of something so horrific and tragedy. I think it is also important to remember that that these were real people. They were someone's friend, mother or father, son or daughter, grandparents, and friends. They had lives and names. Hindsight is always 20/20 and it's easy to look back and see the clear warning signs. To be sure, the lessons to be learned from this tragedy are difficult, painful, and sobering, but they are lessons that must be learned nonetheless. I hope and pray that a tragedy of this magnitude never happens again. But as the old saying goes "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
A powerful and haunting tale that will shock, horrify, and disturb you on the deepest possible level.
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