This has to be the craziest story I have ever read. I know about those Midwestern polygamy camps, but this blows them out of the water. A man by the name of Jim Jones gathered a following, brought them to Guyana, tortured them, and finally had the over nine hundred followers drink the poisoned Kool-Aid in the largest recorded mass suicide. I'm definitely going out and buying this as my next book. Maybe I'll even recommend it to my teacher. I'm sure we could learn something from Jim Jones' rhetoric that he used to persuade the masses to his People's Temple. If not that then I bet it would be an interesting read. The whole story of Jonestown sounds like a movie. I can not even fathom how something as insane as this could have happened. I'm surprised that an event like this can fall into obscurity. I have never seen anything about "the largest number of American civilians in a single non-natural disaster until 9/11," in my history books. Maybe Americans just want to erase this black spot in our history as much as they can. Jones fooled a whole bunch of big public figures. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist perhaps all of the big time politicians that were sucked into the People's Temple tried to cover up their foolishness by covering up the entire event itself. Maybe it is just because as Americans we move on to a new interesting story every week. The story of Jonestown is just too far back in the news archives for it to be an interesting story for the public. Obviously the event received coverage when the story first broke , but to forget the 909 people lost seems wrong. Cultists or not they still deserve our respect. Especially considering the torture they had to endure in Jonestown.
Laura Miller writes an interesting article on what happened at Jonestown. It is in the form of a book review, but she does little to review the book. Instead she tells her readers of the events leading up to that final night in Jonestown. So technically this isn't to great of a review as I have no idea how good or bad Julia Scheeres' book actually is. The story of Jonestown is interesting on its own. I wonder how well Scheeres does to bring a new light to an old tale.
Article:“A Thousand Lives”: What really happened in Jonestown?
I remember seeing a movie about this when I was younger, much younger. It was very impressionable.
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