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Jeff Guinn

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The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple Kindle Edition

by Jeff Guinn (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 2,313 ratings

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2018 Edgar Award Finalist—Best Fact Crime

“A thoroughly readable, thoroughly chilling account of a brilliant con man and his all-too vulnerable prey” (The Boston Globe)—the definitive story of preacher Jim Jones, who was responsible for the Jonestown Massacre, the largest murder-suicide in American history, by the New York Times bestselling author of Manson.

In the 1950s, a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially mixed, and he was a leader in the early civil rights movement. Eventually, Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to northern California, where he got involved in electoral politics and became a prominent Bay Area leader. But underneath the surface lurked a terrible darkness.

In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his early days as an idealistic minister to a secret life of extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing, before the fateful decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November, 1978 when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink.

Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the case, including material released during the course of his research. He traveled to Jones’s Indiana hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed, and uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones’s orders. The Road to Jonestown is “the most complete picture to date of this tragic saga, and of the man who engineered it…The result is a disturbing portrait of evil—and a compassionate memorial to those taken in by Jones’s malign charisma” (San Francisco Chronicle).

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Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of April 2017: It’s interesting that the dust jacket for The Road to Jonestown, Jeff Guinn’s biography Jim Jones, features a photograph of the infamous preacher without his signature, nearly ubiquitous sunglasses. Despite the scale of the Jonestown tragedy – where more than 900 people died, willingly or not, on November 18, 1978 – the man behind the shades and his motivations have remained mysterious, in part because the event is simply hard to look at and difficult to comprehend. Longtime journalist Jeff Guinn, however, doesn’t mind an occasional walk on the wild side. In the same way that his 2013 biography of Charles Manson dug deep to uncover the pivotal moments of the psychopath’s past (it features a boyish, smiling proto-cult-mastermind on its own jacket), Guinn unmasks Jones through interviews with the people who themselves knew him, from townspeople to his parishioners to his the reverend’s own family. The result is a dense read and full of detail, but none superfluous. Images of a 12-year-old walking Indiana backroads - black suit-clad and a bible in hand – and conducting imaginary funeral services alone, in the woods, are weird and indelible. As we witness Jones’s ascent - driven by a blend of well-honed charisma and inclusive, Marxist ideals - then his fall into megalomania and madness, it all makes a little more sense – at least as much as monstrosity at such scale can. The jungles of Guyana may have reclaimed the site of one of the 20th century’s most notorious crime scenes, but The Road to Jonestown answers many of the questions that have persisted for almost 40 years, foremost: How did this happen? But another one remains: After Manson and Jones, where does Guinn go from here? --Jon Foro, The Amazon Book Review

Review

“I have to say that it is weird to find out the background of things that I grew up hearing about around the dinner table. The level of research and detail in The Road to Jonestown is the best ever, and really lets readers understand not only what happened, but how and why. This book tells the Jim Jones story better than anything I have read to date.” (Jim Jones, Jr. )

“Jeff Guinn offers what might be the most complete picture to date of this tragic saga, and of the man who engineered it. . . . The result is a disturbing portrait of evil — and a compassionate memorial to those taken in by Jones’ malign charisma.” (Kevin Canfield The San Francisco Chronicle)

"A thoroughly readable, thoroughly chilling account of a brilliant con man and his all-too vulnerable prey. . . . Generates a bizarre — dare I say Manson-like? — magnetic force that pulls the reader through its many pages. Noir thriller morphs into horror story."
(Dan Cryer The Boston Globe)

"Magisterial. . . . Guinn's exhaustive research, shrewd analysis, and engaging prose illuminate a monstrous yet tragic figure--and the motives of those who lost their souls to him." (Publishers Weekly)

"A vivid, fascinating revisitation of a time and series of episodes fast receding into history even as their forgotten survivors still walk among us." (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

"A powerful account of Jones's life. . . . Guinn's blow-by-blow account of Jonestown's final days in the book's last chapters is riveting." (BookPage)

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01HMXV0AQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Illustrated edition (April 11, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 11, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 64458 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 751 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #180,014 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2 in Guyanan History
- #32 in Occult Cults & Demonism
- #85 in History of Anthropology

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4.5 2,313 ratings

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Jeff Guinn

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Jeff Guinn is a former award-winning investigative journalist and the bestselling author of numerous books, including Go Down Together: The True Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral and How It Changed the West, and Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. Guinn lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

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Jan Hejda

The author’s deft handling of historical facts made this book read like a first person account

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2017

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I have never been more fascinated and hooked on a book prior to reading this one. The summary on the books cover gave a tantalizing glimpse inside one of the most notorious cult killings in American History. If you are interested in American history and psychology, this book is the book for you. There are many literary pieces about the Jonestown Massacre but there are a very few that focus on Jim Jones himself. This author chose to focus on Jim Jones, the man and the personal history of how he became the cult leader we know today. The Road to Jonestown follows the upbring of Jim Jones. As I read the book and looked deeper into Jim’s life, the more I could see how his mind worked. It was very evident that the author spent years analyzing Jones’ life. The book is a very well written with several primary sources. The author’s deft handling of historical facts made this book read like a first person account. The author articulated the story of Jones’ life so well that the reader was able to visualize the events and empathize with the feelings of Jim Jones growing up. I read this book after watching a couple of documentaries about Jonestown. The book was extremely clarifying and better than most documentaries. It was quite interesting to study the massacre from the point of view of Jim Jones and the people around him. Jeff Guinn added many quotes said by Jones. His diction was chilling throughout the book. It gave me the sense of foreboding which reached it fruition with the massacre. Examining Jim Jones’ psychological state helped me understand how his followers could be convinced to commit such a final act. This knowledge helps the reader to understand that although this happened many years ago, the lessons of Jonestown are as pertinent today as they were then.

6 people found this helpful

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Lionel S. Taylor

A Book That Tells the Story Before the Tragic Ending.

Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2018

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This is a topic that I knew just a small amount about and this book really filled in the details for me. Like most people, the only part of the story I was really familiar with was the mass suicide/murder at the end. But this book put it in a context that explains a lot of what these people believed and how they though about the world and about Jones. The tragic ending takes up less than a third of the book and the author does a good job of starting from the beginning and telling the story of Jones as a child, his marriage to his long suffering wife as well as his early days as a pastor in Indianapolis. What is so interesting about this story is that if you did not know how it ended you would think that this was the story of a pastor who while a little strange and controlling had dedicated himself to helping the poor and the downtrodden in society and I got the impression that in the end he still felt he was doing this even if it was selfish and misguided in the extreme.
If there is one shortcoming of this book I think it would have been nice to know what Jones's founders thought of him and why did some of them who had been with him since the beginning stay with him. What was it about his message ( that seemed to be constantly changing) that made it so alluring to some people.
This author does a good job of placing the People's Temple in the context of the thought and political movements of the time especially the parts that talk about Jones's connection to Father Divine and his later involvement in San Francisco politics. This is a fascinating book and as the author point out it is unfortunate that the only way it is remembered by most people is by a bad joke about "drinking the Kool-aid ( it was actually Flavor-aid). This book is a fast and interesting read that would interest anyone who would like to know more about the story of Jim Jones and his followers or want insight into the inner workings of a cult works.

10 people found this helpful

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Noel Kanalley

A compassionate account of an American tragedy

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2017

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The events of November 18th, 1978, will soon be forty years in the past, and while the world is constantly reminded of the phrase "Don't drink the Kool-Aid" (meaning, don't blindly go along with something), hardly anyone, at least anyone I know, is aware of the tragic origins of this maxim. Jeff Guinn's latest book about the story behind this phrase is probably destined to be the final word on the most tragic event in American religious history. He has no ax to grind, and no hidden agenda to propagate. His book may begin with the horrific aftermath of November 18th, but he never forgets that this story is a process. Relatively little time is spent in "Jonestown", the name and place which subsumed what had always been Peoples Temple until November 18th, because this is a story that spans nearly thirty years, only the last two of which were spent in the jungle settlement in Guyana. No one joined a "cult". Some joined a progressive Pentecostal church in Indianapolis in 1952, led by an earnest young preacher with a gift for prophecy, miraculous healing and a passion for racial equality, and his equally earnest wife, both of whom shared a belief in "activist Christianity". Others joined a transplanted progressive church aligned with the Disciples of Christ in rural Ukiah, California in the mid 1960s, focused on "Apostolic Socialism",an interracial lifestyle, and community-wide social service programs. Hundreds of needy people received free welfare assistance, drug treatment, foster-care placement, and elder care in high quality church-run care homes. Others joined a black church located in inner-city San Francisco and Los Angeles, with a strong focus on Marcus Garvey-type "back to Africa" preaching, the social gospel, and racial justice, albeit led by a white minister who often said he wished he was black. Finally, young, ideaistic upper middle class whites, often familiar with the counter-culture and looking for ways to effect positive social change, joined a pseudo-socialist quasi-communal political organization which hid behind the mantle of religion in order to covertly bring as many people as it possibly could towards a belief in socialism. JIm Jones was all of these things to all of these disparate people. And members of all of these groups would die in Jonestown on November 18th, 1978, their trust, idealism, and good intentions utterly betrayed by the man who led them. If that's not the epitome of tragedy, I don't know what is.
Guinn goes into much more detail than previous biographers into Jones's early life, highlighting the role of his mother, Lynetta, in fostering his outsize sense of self-importance with her own beliefs in her (and therefore, his) inherent greatness, reincarnation, and the absurdity of any belief in a "sky God", and the sense that everyone, from their neighbors in Lynn, Indiana to her husband's own family (who had been nothing but generous to her and received only disdain in return), were out to "get" her. These twin delusions of grandeur and paranoia would become the key hallmarks of Jones's personality. Guinn also uncovers the key role neighbor Myrtle Kennedy played in Jones' religious upbringing; introducing him to the bible and setting him up as a child preacher around the small town of Lynn, thus inadvertently setting him on the road to becoming a religious mastermind.
Guinn was able to locate and interview members of the extended Jones family, many of whom had never agreed to an interview before. He also provides the clearest picture yet of Marceline, Jim Jones's long suffering wife and devout believer in activist Christianity. A typical product of respectable Republican middle class south central Indiana, Marceline wanted nothing more than to live a life serving others, which she did by becoming a nurse at Reid Memorial Hospital in Bloomington, and then, after meeting, falling in love with, and then marrying a young orderly named Jim Jones, whom she met while on staff, by serving as chief administrator of his new church's well run elder-care homes and soup kitchen. Guinn follows Marceline's ark from idealistic if conventional minister's wife, to second-in-command of a burgeoning religious movement, to mother of a growing "rainbow family" of adoptive children (only one of their children was biological), to an increasingly disillusioned but resigned woman forced to play "Mother" to Jones's "Father" as the Temple began it's insidious swing from respectable church to cult, to an essential bystander to the increasing horror as Jones and his chief mistresses prepare for a "last stand" in Jonestown as Concerned Relatives and a hostile media converge on the compound. Here, Guinn brilliantly outlines her tragedy as one of confusion and contradiction, a desire to stay to protect her children and a misguided belief that she could stop the "last stand" before it happened. It is at once both compelling and heartbreaking reading.
There are many such stories in this book. We read of survivor Tim Carter's search for enlightenment, his finding community, a wife, and a newborn son, only to lose it all on November 18th. We read of Carolyn Layton's idealistic beliefs in a better world slowly morphing into a horrific echo-chamber for Jones' own delusions. We see shy, kind, introvert Maria Katsaris morph into a fanatical Jones loyalist willing to murder her own surrogate son on his orders. We read of desperate attempts to survive on November 18th, coupled the with fierce determination of others to make a statement to the world through mass suicide; "We died because you would not let us live in peace" Carolyn's sister Annie wrote as a coda to her final note, found by the side of her body, just before she drank flavor-aide laced with cyanide and put a bullet through her head. And Marceline's desperate screams for it all to stop even as hundreds of children died before her eyes, murdered by nurses she herself had trained. The tragedy is monumental, and Guinn captures it all with spare, succinct, and compassionate prose.
In the end, if a full explanation for how a demagogue such as Jim Jones came to lead nearly a thousand people to their deaths 6,000 miles from home remains illusive, is is hardly the fault of Guinn, who spent four years and countless hours of research on this book. Despite all the survivor accounts and testimony found in the aftermath of Jonestown, the people who could really tell us what happened that afternoon are dust. They are mute forevermore. Guinn gives the how and why of the rise and fall of Peoples Temple his best guess, and I have to say, it is the most convincing I've read so far. This disparate group of people were led overtime to accept increasingly incredible things, surrounded by a siege mentality even before the move to Guyana, and conditioned by their own experiences even before arrival in the temple that hostile forces in the United States were out to oppress blacks (which was and is true) and persecute anyone who espoused beliefs in life-ways that rejected capitalism. By the time of the final white night, many were too exahusted, frightened, and terrorized to resist's Jones' assertion that "we be kind to children, and be kind to seniors, and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece". But many did resist. As Tim Carter reminds us, the so called "death tape" was pointed at Jones and his podium. . It doesn't record the screams of protest, the pandemonium of the death scene, the forced injections of the poison under duress.
In the end, Guinn paints a portrait of a movement that could have done (and did do) great things, but which was led astray by the ambition and megalomania of it's leader. It is a portrait of human idealism and human gullibility writ large. And after you read it, you will never, ever utter the phrase "they drank the Kool-Aide" ever again. As Guinn points out, they didn't, neither literally or figuratively.

34 people found this helpful

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EKCR

Very informative

Reviewed in Brazil on June 10, 2023

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Essencial para entender as radicalizações atuais. Pessoas procurando guias filhos e destruindo sua vida, se isolando da família e da realidade. Devemos pensar bem se coisas assim e meditar sobre o mundo atual da radicalização por líderes carismáticos doentios e sem empatia.

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Chris Driedger

Haunting, depressing and unforgettable

Reviewed in Canada on December 8, 2021

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Everyone knows what happened that awful day; this is the account of the years, even decades that led up to it. The story itself is a slow burn, but told at a pace brisk to keep your interest. Exhaustively researched, the author has obviously put great effort into getting as much of the details and story accurate as possible.

A couple caveats; the author does have a sympathetic view of socialism; which may offend some readers. Also, some of the principal and most interesting characters introduced in the first half of the book seem to fade into the background in the second half.

The book itself is excellent; as difficult as it is to accept how it ended; it is not hard to see how Jones kept such a hold on his people. For me, one of the most brutal parts of this book is reading about his loyal wife Marceline, and how thoroughly Jim Jones destroyed her as a person, right up until the end.

Before I read this book, I knew the ending but little about the beginning and middle; recommended to all who are interested in learning about something that started with good intentions and turned out so badly. I expect to seek out more books written by this author.

Obermayr sarah

👍🏻

Reviewed in Germany on February 23, 2024

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👍🏻

hero_of_canton

An interesting and detailed read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 19, 2024

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Most people probably know the story of what happened in Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978 but do they know how events got to that point? Jim Jones was ultimately responsible for the largest murder suicide in American history but how did the cult leader gain such influence over so many people that they were willing to kill and die for him?

I knew the basic story of Jonestown going into this but this book is anything but basic. The level of detail is incredible. Guinn goes right back to the beginning with Jones’ childhood and I must admit, I did find it fascinating to see how he worked his way up to become the head of his own church.

In his own way, he actually started off with what appeared to be good intentions. He wanted to help the local Black community in the fight for equality but his claim to be a believer in socialist ideals was belied by his penchant for keeping money to himself.

This has been quite a slow read for me, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but simply due to the amount of text packed on to each page and the level of detail that Guinn has managed to search out. It must have been an extremely painstaking process to put together the research needed for this book.

It’s a difficult read at times as obviously the whole way through I was very aware of how it was going to end and it’s tough to read about things starting to spiral out of control. There’s that feeling of helplessness as I wanted to be able to stop what was going to happen.

Despite there being a lot of detail Guinn’s writing still manages to hit the emotion of the subject too and really manages to show how the victims came to be under Jones’ thrall.

It’s an incredibly interesting read and I would definitely recommend it if you enjoy true crime books.

Joubert

uno dei migliori libri mai letti..

Reviewed in Italy on February 16, 2018

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Scritto in maniera egregia ed appassionante con un insight molto profondo, difficile staccarsi una volta iniziato, una splendida compagnia in quattro giorni tappato in casa per Influenza!

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