A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

by Julia Scheeres

“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, September 6, 1975

     In 1954, a pastor named Jim Jones opened a church in Indianapolis called People's 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. After Jones moved his church to Northern California in 1965, he became a major player in Northern California politics; he provided vital support in electing friendly political candidates to office, and they in turn offered him a protective shield that kept stories of abuse and fraud out of the papers. Even as Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers found it increasingly difficult to pull away from the church. By the time Jones relocated the Peoples Temple a final time to a remote jungle in Guyana and the U.S. Government decided to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late.
      A Thousand Lives follows the experiences of five People's Temple members who went to Jonestown: a middle-class English teacher from Colorado, an elderly African American woman raised in Jim Crow Alabama, a troubled young black man from Oakland, and a working-class father and his teenage son. These people joined the church for vastly different reasons. Some, such as eighteen-year-old Stanley Clayton, appreciated Jones’s message of racial equality and empowering the dispossessed. Others, like Hyacinth Thrash and her sister Zipporah, were dazzled by his claims of being a faith healer — Hyacinth believed Jones had healed a cancerous tumor in her breast. Edith Roller, a well-educated white progressive, joined Peoples Temple because she wanted to help the less fortunate. Tommy Bogue, a teen, hated Jones’s church, but was forced to attend services—and move to Jonestown — because his parents were members.
      A Thousand Lives is the story of Jonestown as it has never been told before. New York Times bestselling author Julia Scheeres drew from 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. Her own experiences at an oppressive reform school in the Dominican Republic, detailed in her unforgettable debut memoir Jesus Land, gave her unusual insight into this story. 
     The people who built Jonestown wanted to forge a better life for themselves and their children. They sought to create a truly egalitarian society. 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. Yet even as Jones resorted to lies and psychological warfare, Jonestown residents fought for their community, struggling to maintain their gardens, their school, their families, and their grip on reality.
     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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, True Crime, Religion, Cults, Crime, Psychology

307 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2011

About the author

I was born in Lafayette, Indiana and now live in the Bay Area. I'm the author of the memoir "Jesus Land," which was a New York Times and London Times bestseller and of the award-winning "A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown," which is being developed into a feature film. I teach memoir and creative nonfiction, online and in San Francisco, and work with private clients on book projects. For more information, please see: www.juliascheeres.com

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update I finished the book. I don't think it was the definitive story of what happened in Jonestown even though it is probably the most exhaustive. There was too much personal interpretation by the author that was based on her emotional interpretation of the evidence (of which there was plenty) rather than any proper analysis. This isn't necessarily wrong, it's her book. But it doesn't, to me, explain how and why the majority of people committed murder/suicide and why the church in San Francisco was so uninvolved.

Sheeres' attitude towards Jim Jones was that he was an evil controlling Hitler character whose front persona was that he was a Christian pioneer of true racial and gender equality who deteriorated into (fake) paranoid madness.

I felt he was even as a young man suffering from grandiose delusional disorder. The DSM-IV-TR criteria for this include grossly abnormal exaggerated beliefs of:
self-worth
power
knowledge
identity
and an exceptional relationship to a divinity or famous person.

Every single one of those fits Jim Jones from the time he became a preacher, gathered a congregation, built a church and told them he had a direct line to God, had been sent by God and knew God's will. (That rather sounds like an awful lot of preachers doesn't it?)

Before the event, many people wanted to leave and were punished in horrible ways, drugged, locked in isolation chambers, violently beaten and more. But some people did leave. They just walked out and turned up in the US a few days later. Even on the night of the massacre, some escaped. Some. Why not more? They killed their children and watched them die horrible, agonising deaths and then killed themselves. If they really believed in revolutionary suicide why was the church in San Francisco so uninvolved?

It was an interesting book, a bit too interpretative rather than factual in parts and, as the cliche goes, raised as many questions as it answered. And still that sentence jarred on me and I never found the author objective or as credible after I read it as before. 3.5 stars.
____________________

You know how when you are reading, a single sentence can jar on you and make you doubt the veracity or at least the direction of book? I'm about three-quarters of the way through A Thousand Lives; Jim Jones' life can be summed by the cliché, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Just as in reading Leah Remini's Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology and thinking this is yet another hatchet job on Scientology, was it all just threats and fear that keep people Scientologists, I was thinking the same about Jonestown. Maybe. Jones kept their passports, semi-starved them due to lack of agricultural knowledge for tropical rainforest and threatened them with death if they should leave. But then I read the sentence,

"The lack of roughage gave Edith and many others, chronic constipation. Because Jones was too cheap to buy real medicine, health-workers passed out green papaya or plantain as a laxative, but this did little to help."

The "too cheap" is the attitude of the author. Also her attitude towards the reader. Did she not think some of us might be from the tropics and well aware of these fruits and their health benefits? Green papaya makes the most delicious salads and pickles and plantains are a staple of West Indian cooking and well-known, especially green papaya, as a laxative. Guyana is geographically in South America, but its culture is entirely Caribbean.

I had something similar in The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy where the author who has a German maiden name and I often wondered if that had anything to do with it wrote "more shockingly" that the Kennedys approved of forced sterilization of people with mental retardation than he did of the murder of the Jews. "More shockingly" was the author's viewpoint.

I am also reading Philosophy and the Law. It details how by making laws, Hitler chipped away at the rights of Jews little by little, one by one, until they were completely dehumanised until their property could be taken, even by a neighbour, and they could be rounded up and killed. Jones did the same thing. From a Church celebrating unity, he ended up with one where one neighbour beat another for transgressions whilst the entire congregation shouted encouragement.

But still, that "too cheap" rankles. What was there that kept most of the congregation happy enough not to disappear off into the jungle and reappear in California shortly afterwards? What was there that kept the California branch of the Church faithful to Jonestown, sending money, guns and farm equipment? I'm not going to find that out in this book, no more than in Remini's did I find out what keeps people Scientologists.

[Shaun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Death is not a fearful thing, it's living that's treacherous.

Jim Jones November 18, 1978

I was only seven when the massacre/mass suicide at Jonestown occurred, and while I always had a general sense of what happened, until reading this book, I lacked a true appreciation for the magnitude and bizarre nature of this tragedy.

From champion of the oppressed to drug-addled megalomaniac, Jim Jones was an enigma on many fronts. He started off speaking out against racism and segregation, and promoting equal rights in the context of an admirable socialist platform, but ended up a paranoid drunk/drug addict who organized the mass murder of over 900 of his followers, more than a third being children.

Scheeres wants her readers to understand not only why church members were attracted to Jones in the first place, but why they stayed. She realizes it's easy to marginalize his followers as cult members and all the negative associations/assumptions that go with that. After all, normal people don't join cults, right? People don't ever believe stupid, crazy things and, worse, act crazy and stupid based on those beliefs...ever.

In fact, she goes out of her way not to refer to Jones and his followers as a cult.

She offers a satisfactory retelling of the timeline of events and manages to bring a few of the characters to life through journal entries, recordings, and letters. She touches on the circumstances that brought various people into the church, whose greatest selling point seemed to be that it offered a community of acceptance particularly for African Americans (who accounted for about 70% of the church membership even as the majority of church leaders were white).

She explores the growth of the Jones' ministry, which motivated members with passionate diatribes about social injustices and dazzled them with festive sermons featuring awe-inspiring miracles (albeit ones he orchestrated behind the scenes.) She describes Jones as a religious zealot, charlatan, and megalomaniac, among other things, who used sex with both men and women, isolation, manipulation of food, drugs, and other various techniques to get them to sign over their money and ultimately their lives. She paints Jones as a crazed or rather crazy, self-proclaimed revolutionary with a death wish, not only for himself but for his entire congregation.

Her recounting succeeds on many levels, but fails on others. She seems determined to characterize Jim's followers as helpless victims, and on many fronts they were. But I'm not sure she offers anything new. She certainly doesn't explore the complex nature of "brain washing." In fact, I found this 2006 documentaryto cover what she did in the book but with the added bonus of hearing directly from former members who survived.

I also listened to that last suicide meeting, which was taped by Jones and later found and then released by the FBI. It's both chilling and sobering.

I've ordered two more books on the topic, one written by Tim Reiterman, a reporter who visited Jonestown the day before the massacre and who-- along with other press members, Senator Ryan, and several defectors-- was gunned down by members of the settlement (on Jones' orders no doubt) as they tried to leave. The other is written by a survivor and one of Jones' mistresses.

I'll be interested to see how this book stacks up.

[Regina · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 least his persuasiveness in the beginning, and the entrapped feeling his followers must have felt. I knew of the Jonestown tragedy since I was a kid, but I had always thought it was a willing mass suicide. I was very wrong.

Author Julia Scheeres tells the story of Jim Jones and his followers, beginning in Indiana, moving to California, to Brazil and then to Guyana. She tells of his drug addiction, his sexual infidelities and methods of controlling his followers via sex (both male and female), his physical abuse and threats perpetrated against his followers -- both adults and children (so so heartbreaking to read about), and of his entrapping and control of his followers. Through the pages of A Thousand Lives, Scheeres details individual followers' lives -- pieced together from diaries, eye witness accounts and letters. This book is not just a reporting, but an unfolding of a story with multiple people's points of view.

I was surprised to learn that Jones had political ties, both in the US and in Guyana, which enabled him to maintain his operations and keep going. It is amazing, of course viewed in retrospect, that this political pressure he put on leaders in the US and in South America actually worked. After the massacre was over, one third of the people murdered at Jonestown were children (over 300 children). Jim Jones used threat and force to keep people in his church, to prevent them from leaving the grounds of his compound and to ultimately murder them. I won't detail how Jones controlled his followers -- but it is sad and horrific. I will never use the phrase "drink the kool-aid" again to mean someone who buys into a crazy idea.

Ultimatley this book was very informative but (I hate to say it) entertaining. I listened to the audio version and am glad to have learned what I did about the tragic victims of Jonestown. It was heartbreaking to learn, however I still recommend this story.

[Ryandake · Rating 4 out of 5]

this review refers to the audiobook version.

not the sort of book you can get some lively party chat out of, if you plan to get invited back.

Julia Scheeres has some unique credentials for writing about Jonestown: she and her adopted (black) brother were incarcerated in a fundamentalist Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic as adolescents. i can't think of another experience that would have so many resonances with Jonestown: coercion, powerlessness, religion, racial issues, sexism, being trapped.

anybody who recognizes the word "Jonestown" can tell you that a lot of people died there. but not really so many know what the residents of Jonestown had gone there to build: an egalitarian, race-blind, gender-blind, age-blind, socialist/communist society where everybody was free and everybody was equal. i doubt they expected utopia, because they went by and large willing to work very very hard to achieve the society they envisioned.

there's a lot in that that's completely admirable.

i wanted to read the book because i wanted to know why--why did so many commit suicide, why did they not run for help, why didn't they tell Jones to go fuck himself. i just could not wrap my brain around the whys, not at the time of the massacre and not now. i hoped that Scheeres could shed some light there.

and she did, she did. there are still some very dark corners, but what Jones and his henchmen (and -women) did now makes a great deal more sense to me.

Scheeres spends a great deal of time recounting Jones' planning of the "mass suicide" (more on that in a moment), how he convinced his followers to rehearse it, how he harangued them until they must have felt it was not just a possibility, but an inevitability.

but what she ultimately convinces me of is that it was not a mass suicide at all. it was, mostly, coercion and murder.

the children who were killed at Jonestown were, simply, murdered--a child cannot accede to his or her own destruction. the parents of those children did not just give them up to death; the children were often taken from them and killed. and what parent, seeing that, would not wish to go with the children? i would.

i cannot imagine the horror of that last night--it would break anyone's mind.

but i do have a quibble with Scheeres' final statement in the book: that the residents of Jonestown were victims, betrayed by Jones and the Temple leadership. they were, of course, both, but one cannot relieve them of all culpability. there was a lot of evidence in Jonestown that Jones was losing his shit--that he was drunk, or drugged, or just plain deranged most of the time. the endless rehearsals for "revolutionary suicide" surely made it plain that something was rotten at Jonestown's core.

it's not by a long shot for me to shake a finger at the Jonestown dead or at those who survived, and that's not my intent. i just think there is only one salutary lesson to be learned from Jonestown, and that's that one must never give one's autonomy away. to paint the dead of Jonestown as mere victims is to give Jones more power than he was rightful possessor of, which makes it seem inevitable that some other Jones will come along again, and some other horrible event will happen because this next-Jones wills it.

i understand the only memorial to the Jonestown dead is in Oakland. i don't believe in gods of any stripe nor any afterlife, but i might just stop by and send some kind thoughts to those poor gentle dreamers.

re: the audiobook version. the narrator does a more than competent job of it--she sounds as if her compassion for the Jonestown members runs deep, and i appreciated that. it does seem something of a missed opportunity, however, to have not included some of the original source recordings made at Jonestown. it would have been so very much more piercing to hear the Jonestown members themselves speaking to us, ghosts across the years.

now. i read some of the other goodreads reviewers comments on this book, and a good half of them run to "how could people be so weak-minded". sigh.

i can only think those reviewers didn't pay careful attention to the book, or don't know how coercion and terror work.

coercion works in tiny steps: every time you agree to something against which you feel a qualm, you ratchet up to the next step. first, you agree to give a percentage of your money to the church (tithing). for good works, and so on. not difficult, right? next, you agree to sign a loyalty oath to the church. but you already feel loyal, so even though the signing is irksome, you do it because it's not such an imposition and everyone else is doing it anyway. next, you agree to write a confession to an imaginary crime as further proof of your loyalty. the church to which you've sworn loyalty is, you are told, being threatened; the leadership needs to know without doubt who is on their side. and anyway it's a made-up crime, right? it cannot possibly be proved. you sign it; you get a reward.

and so on, and so on, each step ratcheting up. threats and rewards, particularly when intermittent, are powerful, powerful motivators. people who are fundamentally good have a deep need to have that recognized. people who perceive an external threat knit tighter together; it's a positive bond.

if you still think, ya that could never happen to me, think again. how many have thought: if i just work harder and keep my nose clean, the next round of layoffs will skip me (even though you're already working 60 hours a week, 20 of which are unpaid). you probably believe all the chemicals in your dish soap, in your shampoo, in your vegetable wash have been tested for ill effect on humans (hint: they haven't). the entire advertising industry floats on telling you lies, even when the lie is only that you need this toothpaste/lipstick/cologne to be attractive. do you believe that if only the democrats/republicans/libertarians/greens got into office, everything would be ok? and if you keep firmly to positive thoughts, your cancer will go into remission.

the point is, we all are lied to and coerced every stinking day. we lie to and coerce ourselves, our children, our coworkers every stinking day, whether we know it or not. humans are social animals--we take our cues from others, we learn what to believe from others, we gauge how to act or react from others.

and if, as in Jonestown, those others all have had their thinking distorted by endless abuse, coercion, and terror, that's still where you get your cues.

some reviewers have fumed that Jonestown parents gave up their babies and their small children to nurses who then injected the cyanide into the young one's mouths. well, yes, they did; but they were surrounded by armed men and they had probably convinced themselves that the whole exercise was just another drill (there had been many by then). not all parents gave up their children willingly, anyway.

some have said that there were nearly 900 against a small number of armed "security"; the Jonestown residents should have just overpowered them. but this is incorrect math. in Jonestown, trust among residents had been so corroded that the equation was always one against 899--nobody knew who, if anybody, they could trust.

ok. end of rant. i do understand the impulse to just shove Jonestown and all knowledge of it under a neat locked box in the subconscious labeled "i would never do that", but if you truly believe that, you are fooling yourself utterly.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Jonestown tragedy happened the week of my 13th birthday. At the time I remember the nation being stunned and the news stations reporting the details as they came available but the impact on an adolescent girl was less than cosmic. As I finished this book as a much older person I had a much different experience.

Combing threw tens of thousands of documents released to the public and also from tapes already public, the author pieced together Jim Jones' troubled childhood, his conversion to Evangelism, then his meteoric rise as a charismatic and powerful leader. It is riveting, horrifying, and deeply troubling to read the pages of this history.

A sociologist at heart, I remember taking a class during my undergraduate work on cults. A movie had been made of the Jonestown massacre and the death tape was played. As the cyanide laced punch was brought out, I had a presentation to make in another building. I was relieved. This time I stayed until the bitter end of the book and I am absolutely and utterly floored by my own reaction of horror and deep sadness. No review of this book can possibly do justice to the facts which the author objectively provides. Although some conjecture is provided as well regarding the very end.

What is most striking is that it appears that Jones was much more focused on the power he could wield rather than the message. He was narcissistic above all else. His paranoia appeared as he became more powerful and he blatantly controlled his followers through carefully constructed lies and media outlets. He was violently angry when something slipped his control. The mass suicide was the ultimate act of control rather than his stated goal of dying for the beliefs of the Temple. He controlled through fear.

Also troubling is the length of Jones' arm in the political arena. He and his followers were largely responsible for the success in election polls for many politicians in San Francisco at that time which reeks of corruption as he was paid back in kind with favors and appointments of his own. His power is further amplified in Guyana and the American embassy and consulate.

I realize this is a much more serious review than I usually give but I am still reeling and off-center. I am also sadly coming to terms with the lexicon, "Don't drink the Kool-Aid" which is in reference to Jonestown. I never want to hear that phrase again.

[britt_brooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beyond conducting survivor interviews, Scheeres pieced together diary entries, letters, depositions, FBI interviews, and numerous tape recordings found at Jonestown to give us an in-depth look at the Peoples Temple, largely focusing on details about certain members. These accounts provide explicit information I’d never read before. It was totally horrifying to learn details of how the revolutionary suicide was carried out and just how erratic a doped up Jim Jones had become. The survivor stories are gut-wrenching, but fascinating.

[johnny ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love that scheeres doesn't paint the victims as mindless, brainwashed zombies. i just wish she wrote a little bit more about jim jones and his upbringing.

[Shauna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously, some of my nonfiction tastes aren't for everybody; this work is fascinating and disturbing. The author had access to a huge trove of documents, audiotapes, photographs and more relating to Jonestown soon after they were declassified by the FBI. Jonestown was the ex-pat American settlement in Guyana where 900 people died in a mass murder-suicide in November 1978. Scheeres' book strikes a careful balance in avoiding hype (believe me, this story doesn't need any) and sensationalism, and she wrote a well-researched, and still compelling account of the Peoples Temple. It's truly chilling; I remember hearing the news about Jonestown (I was about 11 at the time), and lying in bed wide-eyed and terrified. This book made me feel a lot like that, all over again. Jim Jones, the "God" of the Peoples Temple, had some kind of genius instinct for subjugating common sense and reason, breaking the iron strength of bonds between parents and their children, of siblings, of spouses, and leaving in some cases, nothing but slavish devotion to him and his cause. Meanwhile, he evolved from an apparently charismatic preacher determined to build a world free of racism or sexism, into a monster...a drug-addled, paranoid megalomaniac bent only on fulfilling his psychotic fantasy of "revolutionary suicide" (a term he completely misappropriated from Black Panther Huey Newton). It is a masterful work of research, and of helping you understand (or at least understand a little better) an utterly incomprehensible story.

[Vikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compassionate account of the Jonestown tragedy, A THOUSAND LIVES humanizes the victims rather than painting them as stupid, docile, mindless pawns. Scheeres shows us exactly how the monumentally flawed Jones was able to draw them into his quest for a socialist/agrarian utopia, and then, in his growing drug addiction and paranoia, keep them isolated, scared, hungry, weak and tired enough to stay -- and eventually to die. This book is heartbreaking, disturbing and utterly fascinating.

[Liz Hein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was pretty blind to the events of Jonestown until this book and I’m stunned. It was an eerie time to read this book as there are some parallels to be drawn to current events. It is a reminder that nobody joins a cult. Jim Jones preyed on marginalized people promising them a egalitarian society free from racism and all the other problems in America. Of course, what they got was lies, manipulation, torture, and death. Despite knowing the end from the beginning, the end was one of the most difficult things to read that I’ve encountered. This was well researched, well written, eye opening, and heart breaking. I will also never use the phrase “drinking the kool-aid” again.

[Anna Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been putting off this review because I'm fairly horrified by the contents of this non-fiction read. And by horrified, I mean that I had honest-to-God nightmares about Jonestown. Yes, I was familiar with the tragedy and I knew that an unprecedented number of people had died, but I had no clue as to the terror and abuse that led up to the fateful incident.

“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, September 6, 1975.



And that is just what this maniac did.

What started out as an experiment in human rights, socialism and desegregation in a Pentecostal church quickly became a real life tragedy when Pastor Jim Jones instructed his followers in the People’s Temple Full Gospel Church to commit what he termed “revolutionary suicide.” From Indianapolis to California to Guyana, Jones transplanted his followers to increasingly isolated locations in order to increase his sway over the congregation. Under the influence of a number of drugs, Jones quickly became delusional and abusive to his followers – who were unable to flee from the “church” due to its location in the remote jungle of Guyana. Denouncing the Bible and proclaiming himself as God the Father, Jones became increasingly hostile to outside people and organizations, viewing himself and his members as targets of unjust persecution. On November 18, 1979, Jones demanded his followers commit mass suicide by drinking Kool-Aide laced with poison. Those who did not willingly ingest the poison were forcibly injected with the substance. 909 lives were lost – 304 of those were children whose parents assisted with the murder/suicide. A staggering number of deaths brought about by one man’s drug-addled delusions. Can you picture that? I couldn’t; however, a simple web-search quickly helps frame the enormity of the tragedy, putting it into eerie perspective.



“If anything, the people who moved to Jonestown should be remembered as noble idealists. They wanted to create a better, more equitable, society. They wanted their kids to be free of violence and racism. They rejected sexist gender roles. They believed in a dream.

How terribly they were betrayed.”

This book places faces and personal details behind the body count, illuminating how things went terribly wrong. It is a wrenching, devastating read – but one that I would ultimately recommend to everyone.

[MAP · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book follows the evolution of the People's Temple from a small church in Indianapolis all the way to the mass suicides in Guyana. It's, in general, a well-written book that lays out all the facts and most of the chronology. The progression is followed through a few select people's eyes - mostly survivors, but some others whose records allow them to tell their story from beyond the grave. The book doesn't pretend to be a biography of or psychological exploration of Jim Jones himself, which on the one hand avoids overspeculation and psychoanalyzing, but on the other hand can lead to Jones feeling very much like a distant figure, which is surely not how he felt to his congregation as he yelled at them over the PA day and night. It can also mean that biographical tidbits about Jones' life pop up at strange times - at one point it mentions that a defector knows about Jones' arrest for public indecency in the early 1970s, and since that wasn't mentioned chronologically, it's kind of "huh?" to see it thrown in later. In addition, the building and planning of Jonestown and Jones' involvement in the initial phases seem to get buried amongst other stories.

There are a few flaws - despite the fact that the book ends with "The people who moved to Jonestown should be remembered as noble idealists," throughout much of the first half of the book, the author presents their beliefs in Jones and his "miracles" with no small amount of scorn and condescension. It reminded me a lot, actually, of how a lot of people spoke about Scientologists prior to Leah Remini's series humanizing them. In fact, one of the most startling things about this book is how much it highlights the similarities between People's Temple, Scientology, and even dictatorships like North Korea in the psychological techniques they use to get people to do what they want and to feel as if they have no other choice and to not even know which thoughts are their own and which thoughts are their "dear leaders'."

I would recommend this book to people interested in the People's Temple or in cult behavior in general. It's not exactly a fun read, but it's one that sucks you in.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of us remember that on November 18, 1978 909 people died in Jonestown Guyana where they had gone to live seeking an ideal community with Jim Jones. The peoples Temple began decades before that in Indianapolis Indiana, before moving to Ukiah California then to San Francisco and then the 1970s to South America. This was a predominantly black community although Jim Jones and much of the leadership were white. The book is based on documents and tape recordings that were found in Jonestown after the suicide murder. How so many people were convinced to participate in revolutionary suicide is not fully explained. The power of Jim Jones is displayed by the remaining documentation and the history and operation of this cult is well displayed.

[Athira (Reading on a Rainy Day) · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1954, a pastor named Jim Jones opened a new church in Indianapolis called the Peoples Temple. Being charismatic and fully aware of how to influence people, he began preaching his idealistic beliefs and managed to quickly gather a good number of followers. Over the next twenty years, as the church moved from Indiana to California, and ultimately to its deathbed, Guyana, Jones would amass a huge number of followers, many willing to follow him to the ends of the earth, in the hopes of making the world take heed to their socialistic beliefs. Their temple did make history in 1978, but for its role in the largest mass murder/suicide of Americans, when close to a thousand people either killed themselves or others, in answer to Jones request to commit 'revolutionary suicide'.

I had never known something this horrific had even happened. I ordinarily wouldn't have read this book because of its heavy leanings into religion, but the tragedy behind this book kept popping in my radar. If there's one thing I struggle to understand, its how people can stop trusting their instinct or listening to their inner person, and do something so outrageous as kill themselves. And this isn't one or two people we are talking about - the statistics are incredibly hard to believe. Moreover, this tragedy wasn't the result of a war or a religious faction taking control - instead these people had free will and the freedom to do as they wished. But, as Julia Scheeres shows in this book, A Thousand Lives, it's one thing for me to tell my friends that I'm not interested in joining them for something. It's a totally different thing and an impossibly hard one to walk out of a huge violence-capable mob, with your freedom and dreams intact. And that's why riots are hard to control.

A Thousand Lives chalks the intertwined histories of Peoples Temple, Jim Jones and many of its members. It is written based on the diaries, letters, and several tons of paperwork left behind by the people of Jonestown, recently declassified by the FBA. Some of these documents contain evocative dreams, hopes and wishes, while others are devoid of feeling and very robotic. From very early on, Jim Jones and his temple made for fascinating news material. Stuff about Jones' healings and miracles attracted people. These staged miracles did find him a lot of believers who couldn't wait for him to pull a magic trick on them and ease their sufferings. Jones also seemed to pull in more African Americans with his call for equal rights for all, at a time when America was going through an intense segregation period. And he even had some interesting but disgustingly cheap tactics to discourage people from leaving his temple. From the moment Jones had the eureka moment of taking his power a step beyond, his followers were doomed. And this was many years before the actual tragedy.

Scheeres shows how Jones started off as a perfectly reasonable, though idealistic person. It would be hard to refute his claims, especially by someone looking for some identity, something to belong to. His intentions were initially noble, he genuinely wanted to provide his people a place where they can all be equals and find in others a companion rather than an adversary. And despite what horror he cultivates in the end, it was hard not to see in him what people like to see in some leaders. But power is a dangerous thing in highly influential minds. And paranoia soon starts becoming him.

At the outset, the reader (at least me) doesn't know who manages to survive the tragedy. Although there is no single protagonist, some victims/survivors take the reins of the story occasionally. Some are highly religious people and have always been so, others are looking to find something to help overcome a recent tragedy in their lives, yet others are barely religious, but Jones' teachings made perfect sense to them and hence they decided to join the group. While most of the principal 'characters' in this book sounded sane to me, it is the ones who are always in the background but playing important roles in Jonestown that didn't sound so sane. Almost all the information on them are third-hand, which makes it hard to know exactly what they were thinking or why they felt compelled to partake in Jones' paranoia. Religion and socialism are the two major characters of this book, apart from the architect Jones himself. The author paints a clear picture of how even sane people like you and me ended up committing the unbelievable act.

Ultimately, I'm glad I read this book. Full suspension of belief in some religious people has always boggled my mind. Having been fiercely independent for most of my life, I find it hard to fathom someone else making a decision for me and deciding what I will do each day. There's usually a word for the kind of behavior described in this book - cult. The author makes it clear at the start that she wouldn't be using that word in the book, because it isn't the right word here. The book does justify her perspective (of course she wrote the book), and although I do think it's not too hard to write a story to make it look both cult-like and non-cult-like, I am inclined to agree with her here. There was nothing cultish in the behaviors of the people here, except for maybe their final action, which I'm still struggling to understand on so many levels.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

I vividly remember seeing news reports from the 1978 Jonestown massacre. I remember being especially perplexed at the notion that anyone could poison children, especially their own children, or that so many people could be induced to commit suicide together.

Scheeres has an interesting take on the issue: she is the author of Jesusland, a memoir in which she discusses her own upbringing as the child of conservative/fundamentalist Christian parents, including a time during which she and her brother were sent to a foreign religion-based reform school. Her personal background helped convince Jonestown survivors that she could be trusted with their recollections and gave her unprecedented access to inside information about how Jonestown functioned and how the last days went down. She also had access to thousands of pages of documents recently declassified by the US government, many of them collected in the days immediately following the massacre. This enables her to provide a very detailed look at how Jonestown functioned and how conditions there deteriorated, and why Congressman Leo Ryan's factfinding trip was the unintended catalyst for Jones' suicide/murder plans.

Scheeres' inside access to both survivors and surviving documentation forms one of the strengths of the book. Her compassion for the members of People's Temple is also evident throughout. She does a good job painting a picture of individual members: their previous lives, why they were attracted to the idea of Jonestown, how they experienced their life in Guyana, how they escaped (or didn't escape) the November massacre. The book also benefits from the morbid fascination we feel in response to tragedies of this magnitude; seeking answers, deconstructing events like this is a way we process the horror.

That being said, I did feel that the book had a few issues that made it less than five-star material. The book focuses on Jonestown, and although it does provide some background into the People's Temple and Jim Jones' personal life prior to Guyana, I thought that this part of the book would benefit from being expanded. The depiction of Jim Jones in his earlier years, was glossed over and I think the rest of the book suffers a bit for that. Conversely, I think the book got a bit repetitive and bogged down in detail toward the middle-- perhaps a function of the material on Jonestown that was newly available for review. Last, I felt the author identified a bit too much with the members of the People's Temple to the point that it affected her objectivity in writing about the topic. For example, she studiously avoids using the word "cult," but clearly Jim Jones ran the People's Temple in a manner that jibes with the classic definition of a cult -- separating members from family and outside contact, controlling the nature and quantity of information available to members, coercing members into remaining and threatening dire consequences for leaving the group, the focus on a charismatic leader who is supposedly infallible. I understand that Scheeres was trying to avoid a loaded word, but I believe the book should have addressed this issue straight-on rather than tiptoeing around it. I also felt that her sympathy with the People's Temple members went too far, absolving them of all responsibility for their own personal choices. Yes, Jones was a con man, but on the other hand, wouldn't common sense suggest that a legitimate religious leader would not ask one to write false confessions as a condition of participation, or ask for parents to sign over legal guardianship of their children? There is a balance between blaming the victim and taking a hard look at bad choices that end up putting one in a place of danger, and this balance isn't explored at all, to the book's detriment.

On the whole, though, I found this a fascinating look at a horrifying mass suicide/murder, filling in many of the questions that I had about the entire tragedy. In a world where religious leaders, some say zealots, are increasingly in the news (both politically and socially, from Islamofascists to Christian fundamentalists to Scientologists), a hard look at the use of religion to manipulate and control large numbers of people is critical to avoiding more tragedies like this one, as well as to avoid poor political and individual decisions.

[Dimity · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is easily one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. It’s disturbing not just for the obvious ick factor of being about a mass coerced suicide/murder but because Scheeres convincingly demonstrates that not all of the dead were crazy fanatics and that many were woefully manipulated and misled over a period of years by the charismatic (and surprisingly influential with various government officials) Jim Jones. I didn’t really know anything about Jonestown beyond its use as a punchline in bad jokes and A Thousand Lives provides a thorough and disturbing exploration of the tragedy that is well written and peppered with enough details to satisfy the most morbid of curiosities.

Scheeres focuses her telling of Jonestown on several subjects, mainly individuals (Tommy Bogue, Hyacinth Thrash, Edith Roller) but she also provides interesting analysis of different segments of the Peoples Temple, especially children and teenagers. This focus helps hone what could have easily been an overwhelming tome into a compact and powerful book and provides the reader with a special insight into the victims and survivors that would have been lost had she spent more time detailing Jones’s life.

The part that is hardest for me to shake is the children who were victimized by Jones and his followers. Many of the kids and teenagers were already vulnerable due to precarious family situations (some of them were foster children) and the Peoples Temple’s manipulative structure and methods effectively separated the children from their families, including parents and other relatives who were not wooed by Jones’s rhetoric and desperately wanted to free their children from his clutches. Children and teenagers were subject to archaic corporal punishments and other abuses and many were ultimately murdered by their parents and other adults in the group suicide. Scheeres’s description of the final night of Jonestown is devastating. This book was much easier to read after my daughter was in bed; it was very difficult to reconcile my daughter happily playing at my feet with this book’s description of Jonestown’s youngest victims.

I love to read nonfiction and I am often cursed with knowing the end of the story before I even start reading books about historical events like Jonestown. Occasionally, I will read a history book where the author’s narrative is so compelling and their characterization so astute that I desperately wish the story is the author’s invention to alter. Scheeres’s engaging writing made me fervently and fruitlessly hope for an ending for Jonestown’s duped and abused residents other than the iconic photographs of hundreds of dead bodies in bright attire.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was fortunate to win a copy of this book on Goodreads, and boy, my excitement was well placed.

I thought I knew a lot about the Jonestown Massacre. I was wrong. This book put faces and personal stories and recollections on one of the worst murder-suicides in history, and that just made it that much spookier.

The author starts out the book stating she will not use the word "cult" unless it's in reference of a direct quote from one of her sources. This right away gave her some credibility in my eyes, as it was apparent she was truly trying to understand just exactly how this could happen, and not sensationalize it. Of course, the events were so horrific that there was no need to sensationalize.

Much like the Manson family, Jim Jones' followers started out thinking they had found a leader who represented their values - peace, love, brotherhood, end of racism and sexism, looking to found a utopian commune where they were able to begin their form of revolution. And like Manson's Family, it all went very, very wrong.

Jones was able to manipulate people on many levels - a spiritual level (renouncing Jesus Christ, and only having "Father" Jones be able to guide to salvation), a political level (newspapers, elected officials, controlled by threats and money), physical level (abuses varied from public flagellation and humiliation to sensory deprivation - even for children, sexual abuse also for both sexes. Once people arrived in Jonestown (swayed by propaganda that did not show the reality of the compound) escape was essentially impossible. People starved, people were abused, and then people committed suicide and murdered.

This book chronicles how this all came to a head as Jones descended into madness. This is an unsettling read, as you follow the individual stories of people that were there (and are sharing stories for the first time), which makes it that much more "real" than just seeing old news footage does.

Highly recommended for readers interested in mind control/psychology of psychosis or True Crime.

[LATOYA JOVENA · Rating 5 out of 5]

The people of Jonestown seems to be remember as brain washed cult members who decided to die for idiotic reasons. This is far from the truth. This book sheds light on the individuals who lived and died in Jonestown.

[Meave · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was, of course, extremely upsetting. It's not a full explanation of Jonestown, if that's what you're looking for, because it focuses more on the members of Peoples Temple than Jones himself, and while I would have liked a little more detail as to how Jim Jones went from charismatic young faith healer to murderous dictator, but that is not what this book is for. This gives some of his victims a voice. It's awful and tragic and shocking, even though you know what happened, because you didn't know how it happened and how it felt when it was happening before reading this book.

If nothing else, we owe it to the victims and survivors of Jonestown to stop using "drink the Kool-Aid" to mean "unquestioningly and wholeheartedly accept a doctrine," because by the time it came to poison themselves and their children—their tiny children, some days-old babies—most of the Peoples Temple members had been beaten down into submission, and even then, lots of them resisted. They were failed in a lot of ways and by a lot of people, not least by their own government, and they don't deserve to be memorialized as the archetypal sheeple.

[Faye · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to understand why and how an atrocity like Jonestown could have occurred, and I finished this book still wanting to understand. A Thousand Lives was an accurate retelling of the events that happened at Jonestown but was lacking the details and descriptions that would have made this a truly compelling read. How did Jim Jones cook up the idea of Jonestown? How did he manage to brainwash so many people into becoming his followers? Why were the residents of Jonestown blind to seeing Jim Jones as a fraud? Scheeres did not paint the picture for me and there are so many questions that are still left unanswered.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heartbreaking and enlightening. I pray for the souls lost at Jonestown.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonestown is a thing that has pretty much always fascinated me, but this book is really well written and it's pretty heartbreaking at times.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

”’I love socialism, and I’m willing to die to bring it about, but if I did, I’d take a thousand with me.’”

I’m here to tell you right now that if you read this book, you’ll never look at religious prophets the same way ever again. But at the same time, it’s a book that demands to be read, especially at a time like this.

Back in the 1950s, a young preacher named Jim Jones started a church in Indianapolis. It quickly grew due to its welcoming nature of all people of races and colors in a time when it was socially unacceptable to do so. Partially due to its ever growing size. and partially since Jones was already starting to descend into madness, they moved to California, with their main offices being in San Francisco and Ukiah (we even had a temple here in my hometown, much to our shame). The church grew even bigger, with membership growing into the thousands. Then, the fateful time came when Jones got the bright idea to create a self-sufficient settlement in the tiny South American country of Guyana called Jonestown. The rest, shall we say, is history.

”’This is the age of the antihero. I will go down in history, mark my words.’”

918 people voluntarily committed suicide in Jonestown on November 18th, 1978, including Jones himself, with 304 of them children under the age of 10. Over the years, people have tried to come to terms with this and grasp the fact that this even really, truly happened. Despite this, there’s one question that keeps popping up over and over again; Why? How could one man convince this many people to end their lives, to pack their bags, to move to a country in the middle of nowhere in the deep jungle, just for a cause?

”’How very much I’ve loved you. How very much I’ve tried my best to give you the good life.’”

Julia Scheeres masterfully and sensitively tries to answer these questions this book, and by God does she do an amazing job. She never tried to sensationalize these people’s actions; nor does she condemn them or wonder how on earth they could have acted so crazy in order to do something like that. With tender understanding and a sharp critical eye, Scheeres takes us through a twenty year odyssey and into the mind of a the man who would go down in history for all the wrong reasons.

”In the beginning, Temple members referred to the settlement as the promised land or freedom land. In the end, it would only be known as Jonestown, a place of misery and death.”

Ironically, I don’t think Jim Jones was born mad. From what Scheeres writes, he was considered a little odd during his youth (partially due to the fact that he had an effed up childhood), but nothing to be overly concerned about. What I think did him in was a combination of wanting to be noticed, to be powerful, and the mind-altering, devastating effects of a combination of drugs which basically handed him a death sentence. And he took almost a thousand lives with him in the process.

”Over the years, Jones would continue to chip away at his followers’ faith until they had nothing left to believe in but Jim Jones.”

Scheeres doesn’t try and sugarcoat things for the readers of this book. It’s all there. From how Jones drugged his own parishioners in San Francisco so that they would bend to his every will to how he completely and utterly brainwashed them into doing anything and everything he wanted to, instilling so much fear into them about everything around them that they didn’t know what was real and what was fiction, it’s all there for you to read. And let me tell you, it’s hard to read. I tried to read a memoir before this, and I couldn’t get into it because I felt so removed from both the topic and how it was narrated. But in this book, I felt like I was actually there, and even though Scheeres told this book from third person perspective, I could feel the claustrophobic fear, the sense of losing control, and the utter hopelessness of the people of Jonestown. I also liked that she put in anecdotes and stories from survivors who chose to share their story with the author, and the utter sadness and pain that still comes across their voice when they remember their time in Jonestown. What makes it even more sad is that some people, even though they don’t miss the Jonestown aspect of it, miss the sense of community that was there in the beginning, when they felt they could change the world one person at a time.

”’There were a lot of people in the church who believed in me and supported me. I don’t have that no more.’”

If you have to read one book about the Jonestown massacre -- whether to satisfy your curiosity, whether it’s a research book for class, if you’re dipping your toes into the realm of nonfictionland, or if you simply want a look into the mind of one the most infamous cults in American history -- read this book. Julia Scheeres delicately but masterfully balances a fine line between being a reporter and being respectful to those who have survived. She brilliantly captures the mind of a man who could have been great, but for reasons only known to him did he decide to take the wrong path, and lead unwilling, innocent people to their almost certain deaths.

Endnote: Somewhat morbidly, I started this book so it would coincide with the 38th anniversary of the massacre to try and understand more about Jones’ influence, as well as try and have a better understanding of the man behind the madness. And ironically, when I started it, the event that would now be known as the disastrous 2016 presidential election was happening. And the more and more I read this book, the more and more I came to realize something truly horrifying. The people who joined the People’s Temple , who wanted to be the one great change in the world, wanted the same exact things and changes that people are calling for right now.

”The people who moved to Jonestown should be remembered as noble idealists. They wanted to create a better, more equitable, society. They wanted their kids to be free of violence and racism. They rejected sexist gender roles. They believed in a dream.

How terribly they were betrayed.”

We want peace, we want an end to the various racisms, macro, and micro-aggressions here in the United States. It almost feels like we’re living in a hybrid world of 1960s racist America and 1930s Nazi Germany. People are so frustrated, so tired, and so ANGRY that it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if a Jim Jones type of figure were to pop up and prey on people’s weaknesses. Now I know there are some of you rolling your eyes melodramatically and saying that I’m being completely ridiculous and something like this would never happen in a million years, cause we’re smarter than that. And to that I say this; I thought that during this election cycle we would be smarter than this.

Look what happened.

Look at the genuine fear and anger on most people’s faces. See the rage and hate running rampant right now, just as it was in the 1960s during the worst of black/white relations. Observe the xenophobia being practiced right now by those who believe that now the Great Oompa-Lumpa has been elected, they can do whatever they want and terrorize whomever they want.

How easy it would be for someone like Jim Jones to come along and offer the people who are living in fear hope, only to lead them down a rabbit hole with no escape, a hell of their own making.

I pray to God I’m wrong.

”It will not hurt. If you’d be... if you’ll be quiet. If you’ll be quiet.”

[Zella Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the most comprehensive book on Jonestown but definitely the best at capturing the batshit crazy day-to-day life details of living under Jim Jones's control. Most books on Jonestown focus on Jim Jones, which is reasonable enough, but this one instead focuses on his victims/followers, a much-needed corrective to the usual narrative. I've read quite a bit on Jonestown and some of the stories and people introduced here were new to me.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for my TPL bookclub. Interesting read about the crazy psychotic story of Jim Jones and his cult and the tragedy of the people that got swept up in it.

[Colleen]

Heartbreaking. A very fast read. I can't believe this piece of history is not more well-known. Investigative & narrative journalism at its finest, IMO.

[Kerry O'Brien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aghhhh so good. I was engrossed the whole time. I knew about Jonestown but didn't know the full details... absolutely worth finding out. So chilling yet such a fascinating study of the power of conformity/obedience.

[Charity · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.8

[Lisa (Harmonybites) · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Paul Pessolano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A Thousand Lives” by Julia Scheeres, published by Free Press.

Category – Religion/ Biography/True Crime

WOW and double WOW!!!!!! I read this book in one night finding it absolutely impossible to put down. If you were born after 1980 you probably have little or no knowledge of Jim Jones and the Jonestown murder/suicides; however that should not be a problem because the story is as real and poignant as it was back then.

Jim Jones became a Pentecostal preacher, starting in Indiana and moving to California. His church, People’s Temple, started slow but gained momentum to the tune of over several thousand followers. Jones preached socialism and used racial equality as his standard. The majority of his followers were made up of depressed people, the alcohol or drug addicted, and the poor and uneducated. However, he did pull many from the mainstream of society. Jones’s charisma was so powerful that he was able to get his followers to turn everything they owned over to the church with the promise that the church would take care of them for the rest of their lives. Many left their comfortable homes to live in communes that the housing was far from adequate.

Jones, believing he was being persecuted by government, moved a thousand of his members to Guyana in South America. Jones painted a picture of idyllic living conditions that bordered on a paradise on earth. The truth of the matter lay in that housing conditions were inadequate and there was always a shortage of food. Meals sometimes consisted of little more than a handful of rice covered in a sauce.

Jones held sway over his flock by making them believe that they would be invaded at any moment by authorities and that the government was conspiring against them and was the cause of all their problems. It was not unusual for him to call an evening meeting that would last until dawn. Attendance was mandatory and the members had to be alert at all times.

When a United States Congressman, Leo Ryan, brought things to a head, he was murdered with several other people and Jim Jones knew he was in serious trouble. Jones, now drug addicted and an adulterer, asked his congregation to commit “Social Suicide” with him, although some willing drank the cyanide based drink most had to be forced or had the poison injected into them. The total dead came to just over 900 people and many of them children.

This is an incredible and unbelievable read.