The Road to Jonestown

The Road to Jonestown
Author: Jeff Guinn
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476763828

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A portrait of the cult leader behind the Jonestown Massacre examines his personal life, from his extramarital affairs and drug use to his fraudulent faith healing practices and his decision to move his followers to Guyana, sharing new details about the events leading to the 1978 tragedy.

A Thousand Lives

A Thousand Lives
Author: Julia Scheeres
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2011-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 145162896X

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In 1954, a pastor named Jim Jonesopened 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. As Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers leaned on each other to recapture the sense of equality that had drawn them to his church. But even as the congregation thrived, Jones made it increasingly difficult for members to leave. By the time Jones moved his congregation to a remote jungle in Guyana and the US government began to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late. A Thousand Lives is the story of Jonestown as it has never been told. New York Times bestselling author Julia Scheeres drew from tens of 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. The people who built Jonestown wanted to forge a better life for themselves and their children. 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. 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.

Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple

Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple
Author: Rebecca Moore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2018-07-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1440864802

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This in-depth investigation of Peoples Temple and its tragic end at Jonestown corrects sensationalized misunderstandings of the group and places its individual members within the broader context of religion in America. Most people understand Peoples Temple through its violent disbanding following events in Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 Americans committed murder and suicide in a jungle commune. Media coverage of the event sensationalized the group and obscured the background of those who died. The view that emerged thirty years ago continues to dominate understanding of Jonestown today, despite the dozens of books, articles, and documentaries that have appeared. This book provides a fresh perspective on Peoples Temple, locating the group within the context of religion in America and offering a contemporary history that corrects the inaccuracies often associated with the group and its demise. Although Peoples Temple had some of the characteristics many associate with cults, it also shared many characteristics of black religion in America. Moreover, it is crucial to understand how the organization fits into the social and political movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: race, class, colonialism, gender, and other issues dominated the times and so dominated the consciousness of the members of Peoples Temple. Here, Rebecca Moore, who lost three family members in the events in Guyana, offers a framework for U.S. social, cultural, and political history that helps readers to better understand Peoples Temple and its members.

Go Down Together

Go Down Together
Author: Jeff Guinn
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 650
Release: 2012-12-25
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 147110575X

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From the moment they first cut a swathe of crime across 1930s America, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker have been glamorised in print, on screen and in legend. The reality of their brief and catastrophic lives is very different -- and far more fascinating. Combining exhaustive research with surprising, newly discovered material, author Jeff Guinn tells the real story of two youngsters from a filthy Dallas slum who fell in love and then willingly traded their lives for a brief interlude of excitement and, more important, fame. Thanks in great part to surviving relatives of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who provided Guinn with access to never-before-published family documents and photographs, this book reveals the truth behind the myth, told with cinematic sweep and unprecedented insight by a master storyteller.

Slavery of Faith

Slavery of Faith
Author: Leslie Wagner-Wilson
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0595512933

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Slavery Of Faith...the quietly kept story of a young woman's escape through the jungles of Jonestown, Guyana the morning of the massacre November 18, 1978 and her struggles to live in the aftermath. November 18, 2008 marks 30 years since the Jonestown, Guyana Massacre/Suicides and the death of its founder, the Reverend Jim Jones. Escaping Jonestown, Guyana the morning of November 18,1978 with nine others, Leslie Wagner-Wilson then twenty one years old, trekked thirty seven miles through the jungle with a 40-pound care package strapped to her back with a sheet, her son, later to be known as the youngest survivor of Jonestown. That evening, she would be told that Jonestown was gone along with her plan to escape and return with her father, Richard Wagner who was a part of the Concerned Relatives to free the rest of her family. Amongst the carnage would be her husband, mother, brother, sister, niece, nephew, sister in law, brother in law and the friends she had grown up and loved since 13. Slavery of Faith reveals the life of a thirteen year old coming of age in the heart of People's Temple Disciples of Christ Church where the pastor Jim Jones, exhorted his followers to consider him divine and to call him "Father" while he touted his extra-marital affairs from the pulpit. The world of Jim Jones was one of inverted ideals, isolation and alienation. However, what began as a church that appealed to peoples inner spirit to help others, was turned into a living hell. Yet it was a place she would go, half a continent away, to be with her 2 year old son, who'd been taken to Jonestown by Jim Jones as he made his exodus to Guyana. It shares the horrors of Jonestown - the labor punishment squads, suicide drills, sleep deprivation, drugging, and humiliations. It also takes the reader through the escape that she says was revealed to her in the spirit. Thirty years since Jonestown, Slavery of Faith also chronicles her return to the U.S. under a veil of secrecy in fear of the "death squads", her fight to maintain her faith in her most darkest hours; suffering survivors guilt, drug addiction, a family suicide, and finally redemption. It shares her journey through psychological and spiritual jungles to reach a place of remembrance-- to "live their love and not their deaths." Faith has allowed her the resiliency to as she states "tuck and roll" and discover that through pain, tragedy and joy, her life has found divine order.

Seductive Poison

Seductive Poison
Author: Deborah Layton
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2010-08-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307575136

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In this haunting and riveting firsthand account, a survivor of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple opens up the shadowy world of cults and shows how anyone can fall under their spell. A high-level member of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple for seven years, Deborah Layton escaped his infamous commune in the Guyanese jungle, leaving behind her mother, her older brother, and many friends. She returned to the United States with warnings of impending disaster, but her pleas for help fell on skeptical ears, and shortly thereafter, in November 1978, the Jonestown massacre shocked the world. Seductive Poison is both an unflinching historical document and a suspenseful story of intrigue, power, and murder.

Raven

Raven
Author: Tim Reiterman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2008-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1440634467

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The basis for the upcoming HBO miniseries and the "definitive account of the Jonestown massacre" (Rolling Stone) -- now available for the first time in paperback. Tim Reiterman’s Raven provides the seminal history of the Rev. Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and the murderous ordeal at Jonestown in 1978. This PEN Award–winning work explores the ideals-gone-wrong, the intrigue, and the grim realities behind the Peoples Temple and its implosion in the jungle of South America. Reiterman’s reportage clarifies enduring misperceptions of the character and motives of Jim Jones, the reasons why people followed him, and the important truth that many of those who perished at Jonestown were victims of mass murder rather than suicide. This widely sought work is restored to print after many years with a new preface by the author, as well as the more than sixty-five rare photographs from the original volume.

Hearing the Voices of Jonestown

Hearing the Voices of Jonestown
Author: Mary McCormick Maaga
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0815650469

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When over 900 followers of the Peoples Temple religious group committed suicide in 1978, they left a legacy of suspicion and fear. Most accounts of this mass suicide describe the members as brainwashed dupes and overlook the Christian and socialist ideals that originally inspired Peoples Temple members. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown restores the individual voices that have been erased so that we can better understand what was created—and destroyed—at Jonestown, and why. Piecing together information from interviews with former group members, archival research, and diaries and letters of those who died there, Maaga describes the women leaders as educated political activists who were passionately committed to achieving social justice through communal life. The book analyzes the historical and sociological factors that, Maaga finds, contributed to the mass suicide, such as growing criticism from the larger community and the influx of an upper-class, educated leadership that eventually became more concerned with the symbolic effects of the organization than with the daily lives of its members. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown puts human faces on the events at Jonestown, confronting theoretical religious questions, such as how worthy utopian ideals come to meet such tragic and misguided ends.

The Autobiography of Santa Claus

The Autobiography of Santa Claus
Author: Jeff Guinn
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2006-10-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101127775

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It all started when Jeff Guinn was assigned to write a piece full of little-known facts about Christmas for his paper, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. A few months later, he received a call from a gentleman who told him that he showed the story to an important friend who didn’t think much of it. And who might that be? asked Jeff. The next thing he knew, he was whisked off to the North Pole to meet with this “very important friend,” and the rest is, well, as they say, history. An enchanting holiday treasure, The Autobiography of Santa Claus combines solid historical fact with legend to deliver the definitive story of Santa Claus. And who better to lead us through seventeen centuries of Christmas magic than good ol’ Saint Nick himself? Families will delight in each chapter of this new Christmas classic—one per each cold December night leading up to Christmas!

The Vagabonds

The Vagabonds
Author: Jeff Guinn
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501159313

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A “fascinating slice of rarely considered American history” (Booklist)—the story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison—whose annual summer sojourns introduced the road trip to our culture and made the automobile an essential part of modern life. In 1914 Henry Ford and naturalist John Burroughs visited Thomas Edison in Florida and toured the Everglades. The following year Ford, Edison, and tire maker Harvey Firestone joined together on a summer camping trip and decided to call themselves the Vagabonds. They would continue their summer road trips until 1925, when they announced that their fame made it too difficult for them to carry on. Although the Vagabonds traveled with an entourage of chefs, butlers, and others, this elite fraternity also had a serious purpose: to examine the conditions of America’s roadways and improve the practicality of automobile travel. Cars were unreliable and the roads were even worse. But newspaper coverage of these trips was extensive, and as cars and roads improved, the summer trip by automobile soon became a desired element of American life. The Vagabonds is “a portrait of America’s burgeoning love affair with the automobile” (NPR) but it also sheds light on the important relationship between the older Edison and the younger Ford, who once worked for the famous inventor. The road trips made the automobile ubiquitous and magnified Ford’s reputation, even as Edison’s diminished. The automobile would transform the American landscape, the American economy, and the American way of life and Guinn brings this seminal moment in history to vivid life.