UBC: Guinn, The Road to Jonestown
Jan. 14th, 2018 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny
The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff GuinnMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read this book in a kind of mesmerized revulsion; Guinn does an excellent job conveying the contradictory nature of his subject--Jim Jones was simultaneously a passionate social reformer and a self-absorbed narcissist, a man who genuinely cared about the poor and downtrodden and a cynical conman who would bilk them out of every remaining penny they had. Peoples Temple (no article, no apostrophe) was both a glowingly idealistic socialist movement in the actual best sense of the word . . . and a doomsday cult. It's the contradiction that maintains a sense of cognitive dissonance; Jones was a demagogue, but as Guinn points out, he was a demagogue who appealed to people's best instincts, instead of their worst. I kept trying to make the paradox resolve, and it kept refusing to do so.
All I had known about Peoples Temple was the mass murder-suicide in Guyana--I hadn't even known that there was a name for them besides "Jonestown"--so I was fascinated by the details of what Peoples Temple was, just as I was horrified by the details of what Jones, having created it, proceeded to turn it into. And the way in which people who should have known better let him do it, because they believed in the same ideals he did.
The next time someone tries to tell you the ends justify the means, tell them to look at the Reverend Jim Jones.
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Date: 2018-01-14 09:45 pm (UTC)Um ... hi! I'm a lurker who really enjoys your book reviews. :D
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Date: 2018-02-07 01:01 am (UTC)I remember hearing about Peoples Temple contemporaneously, and it was even more paradoxical, if that's possible.
There's an excellent NPR documentary, but it requires Realplayer
https://www.npr.org/ramfiles/981112.news.01.ram