Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown [Hardcover]
- Author by Scheeres, Julia
Editorial Reviews
From Publisher
In 1954, a pastor 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. 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 Peoples 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 Jones's 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.
Reviews
- From Publishers Weekly
- While researching a novel set in a cult environment, Scheeres (Jesus Land) discovered the 50,000 pages of documents released by the FBI about the mass-murder suicide at Jonestown. She decided to change her project, and the result is this detailed, haunting account of the zealous young preacher from Indiana who convinced 1,000 people to move to a farm in Guyana and sacrifice their lives according to his vision. As Scheeres writes, Jim Jones "painted himself as modern Moses who would save his people...by leading them to the promised land of Jonestown." The book maintains some novelistic features, particularly excellent character development, as seen in the vividly described, though still elusive Jones. Jonestown residents like Tommy Bogue, a rebellious teenager frequently a victim of Jones' ire, and Edith Roller, passionate socialist and Jonestown chronicler, are among the good people caught up in Jones's twisted vision. Scheeres quotes heavily from the 45-minute recording Jones made while instructing his people to drink poison, and the final pages follow up with some of the survivors. 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. (Oct.) Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information.
- From Booklist
- Initially doing research for a work of fiction about a fanatical Indiana preacher, Scheeres' access to newly released FBI files inspired her to chronicle Jim Jones' Peoples Temple instead. How did a religion based at its outset on integration and empowerment eventually bring about the largest mass murder-suicide in modern history? Using information culled from video and sound recordings, journals, and interviews with survivors, Scheeres pieces together what reads like an incident-by-incident time line of the temple and its eventual fate at Jonestown. Scheeres' personal experience, reported in Jesus Land (2005), no doubt helped her to achieve exceptional insight into the peculiarity of the cult's behavior, yet this book includes nary a personal interjection or anecdote and feels sometimes hurried and too quickly wrapped up. The poverty of her resources is, of course, that the only interviewable witnesses are those who defected or escaped, and while it eventually becomes clear that Scheeres believes the almost 1,000 who died were victims of a hopeless situation, this stranger-than-fiction true story of great human interest is often lacking in humanity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)
Quote Reviews
- "I thought I knew the story of Jonestown, but in reading "A Thousand Lives" discovered that much of what I'd read and heard was pure myth. Through meticulous research, beautiful writing and great compassion, Scheeres presents an engrossing account of how Jim Jones' followers--eager parishioners who yearned for a more purposeful life and were willing to work for it--found themselves trapped in a nightmare of unfathomable proportions. This book serves as testimony to the seductiveness of religious fervor, and how in the wrong hands it can be used to nefarious ends. It is also a poignant and unforgettable tribute to those who lost their lives and to those few who survived."""-- Allison Hoover Bartlett, author of the bestselling" The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession"
- "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
- "Julia Scheeres' "A Thousand Lives"... tells the tragic tale of Jonestown -- in its way, a peculiarly American apocalypse." --"L.A. Times"
- "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"
- "This the best book in a good long time on the dangers of fanatical faith, the power of group belief and lure of deep certainties. These demons that haunt the human mind can only be countered by facing them with courage and honesty - this is precisely what Scheeres has done." --Ethan Watters, author of "Crazy Like Us"
- "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"
- "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
- "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"
- "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'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"
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