Desperation is an extraordinary emotion. While it can drive us to phenomenal feats of insight and innovation, it can also compel us to believe in the most pathetic flights of fancy. It can motivate our minds to race against time to unlock the mysteries of impossible challenges, but it can also invite the spiritually wounded to find only glory in the petty schemes of others, suspicion suspended by a desperate desire to believe in the pure. Light and darkness, insight and blindness... These are just some of desperation's gifts. But what of its faces? What of its costs? For answers, we need only to turn to Ms. Scheeres' riveting and foreboding reconstruction of the Jonestown disaster.
Born in depression-era Indiana, Jim Jones, the man who would one day execute one of the largest events of mass-suicide in recent history, was a sensitive but troubled youth whose dissatisfaction with the external world and all its racial and economic divides compelled him to seek out answers to the world's many injustices. Embracing both Christianity and socialism, he started a small church in Indiana which, in time, grew in both its size and its devotion to its charismatic leader. In the late 1960s, believing the world to be set on a course for nuclear war, Jones relocated his flock to California where both his message and influence spread until the doors to the halls of power were open to him and his People's Temple. Here, under the aegis of good works, Jones convinced his followers to live communally with one another, surrendering their labor and their worldly goods to Jim Jones in the furtherance of his ministry.
In the early 1970s, feeling persecuted by suspicious authorities and those disenchanted souls who had left his temple, Jones dispatched loyal lieutenants to Guiana where, over a two-year period, they constructed a socialist sanctuary, christening it Jonestown. There, until 1978, Jones and the bulk of his nearly 2,000 followers tried, with varying degrees of success, to eke out an existence in a land that stubbornly refused to be cultivated. Their setbacks, along with increased scrutiny from distressed relatives of temple members, accelerated Jones' descent into a state of constant paranoia in which virtually everyone, including his own people, became possible members of a conspiracy against him. Armed with both his fears and messianic delusions, Jones used a toxic blend of violence and coercion to browbeat his followers into submitting to his plan for what he called revolutionary suicide, an act of mass-killing that would deliver his acolytes into paradise. After months of threatening such nihilism, Jones finally carried out his nightmarish plan on November 18th, 1978, forcing his flock, at gunpoint, to drink poisoned Kool-aid. Hours later, surrounded by a thousand of his dead disciples, Jones ended the drama with a single, self-inflicted gunshot to the temple.
As chilling as it is compelling, A Thousand Lives is weighty work. Ms. Scheeres, who admits to having been raised fundamentalist Christian, exhibits an abiding sympathy for Jones' victims, many of whom she appears to have personally interviewed for this book. Their accounts, which are universally harrowing and heartbreaking, consistently portray Jones as a dynamic leader whose siren song of racial harmony lured into his power the weak and the wounded, the idealistic and the innocent. He gave them hope which earned him their goodwill which he then used to create Jonestown, a vortex of death and despair that now stands as a warning to all that humans, no matter how good of spirit or pure of purpose, are poorly equipped to withstand the seductions of absolute power. Being that Jim Jones was far from good or pure, his fall from whatever grace he had was swift and sure.
This is a challenging read for there are no easy villains here. Certainly, Jim Jones deserves to be fitted for a black hat, but one gets the sense, from Ms. Scheeres' account, that Jones was little more than a charismatic extension of his followers, men and women who, for reasons of family, society, or biology, were profoundly broken. Jones merely provided a conduit for that dysfunction, channeling it into a doomed venture, a doomed faith, a doomed dream. Read this book. And then go to those who have loved you and done you a good turn and thank them. For it is their kindness that has helped to keep you from dissolving into this darkness. (4/5 Stars)
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