by Julia Scheeres
This week, I've been finishing the audiobook version of A Thousand Lives, Scheeres' account of the Jonestown massacre. I have also discovered Thirty Seconds to Mars. Tears and awe in the car--and I've been amazed at the eerie appropriateness of the lyrics to many songs on the LOVE LUST FAITH + DREAM...
This book will lead you on a tour of humanity that could make you despair. How people were so astonishingly stupid (stupid may sound harsh, but as the tale of the people's temple unfolds, it's really the only conclusion I could come to) to fall for Jim Jones and his lunacy is something that is impos...
I love socialism, and I’m willing to die to bring it about, but if I did, I’d take a thousand with me. - Jim JonesThis is about Jonestown, Jim Jones, and how he took almost a thousand lives. We remember it as a mass suicide, and the phrase "drinking the kool aid," has come to mean someone who mindle...
Scheeres effectively demytholgizes and poignantly puts human faces on this terrifying tragedy.
This is a well-researched and docuemnted book detailing the lives of Jim Jones's followers. The narrative is based on 50,000 pages of documents (diaries, notes, etc) released by the FBI and seized from Jonestown. The author has a good voice and is able to convey both Jim Jones's persuasiveness, at...
The story of Peoples Temple still warrants attention, and in A Thousand Lives, Julia Scheeres tells it with a degree of thoroughness and detail that it’s rarely been given before. Although most of the principals of Peoples Temple died with it and many of its own records were destroyed before they co...
Let me begin this review by saying yeah, yeah, this really isn’t the type of book I normally read and review for my blog. In fact, this will probably be one of the stranger things you view here because non-fiction generally isn’t my thing after six years of political textbooks and memoirs about Pre...
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