14 books completed (40 for the year)

 

best first-read fiction: tie between I Know This Much is True (ebook) and The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor (ebook)

 

best nonfiction first-read: A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown (audio)

 

comfort reread of favorite:Harriet the Spy (ebook)

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 + DREAMS album. They sound as if they are describing Jim Jones:

 

I'm tired of the waiting,
For the end of all days.
The prophets are preaching,
That the gods are needing praise.
The headlights are coming,
Showing me the way.
The serpents are singing,
A song that's meant to say:

All we need is faith.
...
A maniac's new love song.
Destruction is his game.
I need a new direction,
Cause I have lost my way.
...
The maniac messiah,
Destruction is his game.
A beautiful liar,
Love for him is pain.
The temples are now burning,
Our faith caught up in flames.
I need a new direction,
Cause I have lost my way.
...

--"End of All Days"

 

I loved this book because it was about the people who lived and died at Jonestown, rather than Jim Jones himself. It humanized the whole event--and it celebrated Congressman Leo Ryan, the only US Senator to be assassinated while performing his duties. Imagine your congressman being told that you are concerned about relatives living in a foreign country, possibly being held against their will. Now imagine that senator flying to that country in response to personally check on those relatives' welfare.

 

You can't do it, can't you?

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 impossible to understand.
The constant warning signs of danger, from the church's early days through to it's at times farcical time in Guyana is an indictment of both individuals and governmental gullibility and inaction.
Jim Jones and his closest confidantes were indeed evil people, but the knowledge that his evil and madness were always self evident makes this story such a profound tragedy.
I am still trying to make sense of this tragedy, where people willingly put aside reason and common sense to literally follow this lunatic to their deaths. So stark is the evidence of their stupidity, that I can't even find sympathy for these people - only horror that so many of them were willing to firstly deprive their children of a normal upbringing and then to lead those innocent children to their deaths.
At the end, to hear the tales of some of the survivors lives after Jonestown only reinforces your despair - to see some of them survive only to continue to make dumb life decisions just leaves you shaking your head.

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 Jones

This 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 mindlessly swallows lies and obeys because that's how the poison was administered. I think this is one of saddest stories I've read in a long time--and considering my recent reading has included tales of genocide and war--that's saying a lot. I think part of what I found so sad--the slaughtered children aside, hundreds of them--is this is a tale of people who willingly followed. These people didn't come to Jonestown in cattle cars they were shoved into at gunpoint--they came by plane and boats having handed over their lives to the People's Temple and Jim Jones in pursuit of an ideal.

Julia Scheeres tells the tale with a great deal of empathy. She grew up in a religious and interracial family, with an adopted black brother. She speaks in her introduction of how appealing she would have found the integrated People's Temple with its socially progressive ideals in its heyday--a place where she and her brother would have been welcome to worship side by side. She said in that introduction that she would not use the word "cult" unless quoting others--that she felt it blocked empathy and understanding. She focused in particular on five members who stood for and were typical of the whole--an elderly black woman Hyacinth Thrash; an elderly white woman, Edith Roller; a young black man, Stanley Clayton; Tommy Bogue, a white teen, and his father Jim. By focusing on them Scheeres makes clear what initially drew members in, the nightmare the settlement became even before the slaughter--and a personal dimension that makes these people to care about not dismiss as mindless zombies. When she focuses on the five, the narrative becomes novelistic, tells a story. But it also pulls back for a longer view that tells the story of Jim Jones and his inner circle. Scheeres was able to make use of a fairly recently released archive of records and documents the FBI recovered from Jonestown.

Certainly the book gave me aspects of the story that if not before "untold" at least were by me unappreciated. For one, Jones had long morphed out and away from Christianity--his devotion by the time the settlement was established was to communism--he called the mass slaughter "revolutionary suicide," a phrase he took (and distorted) from Black Panther Huey Newton. Jonestown itself comes across as a mixture of Soviet Gulag and Southern Slave Plantation. For another, this was more mass murder than mass suicide--and was meticulously planned and prepared for months--not something done out of panic after Congressman Ryan's assassination. So yes, I think this book well worth reading, both as a gripping account of a tragedy and an insightful portrait of a planned dream of utopia turning to ashes--even if the lessons I'd draw from it might be different than Scheeres--although to her credit I think she leaves such conclusions up to the reader.

Scheeres effectively demytholgizes and poignantly puts human faces on this terrifying tragedy.