A Thousand Lives

Starred review from August 29, 2011
While researching a novel set in a cult environment, Scheeres (Jesus Land) discovered the 50,000 pages of documents released by the FBI about the mass-murder suicide at Jonestown. She decided to change her project, and the result is this detailed, haunting account of the zealous young preacher from Indiana who convinced 1,000 people to move to a farm in Guyana and sacrifice their lives according to his vision. As Scheeres writes, Jim Jones "painted himself as modern Moses who would save his people...by leading them to the promised land of Jonestown." The book maintains some novelistic features, particularly excellent character development, as seen in the vividly described, though still elusive Jones. Jonestown residents like Tommy Bogue, a rebellious teenager frequently a victim of Jones' ire, and Edith Roller, passionate socialist and Jonestown chronicler, are among the good people caught up in Jones's twisted vision. Scheeres quotes heavily from the 45-minute recording Jones made while instructing his people to drink poison, and the final pages follow up with some of the survivors. Chilling and heart-wrenching, this is a brilliant testament to Jones's victims, so many of whom were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

December 1, 2011

Scheeres (Jesus Land: A Memoir) revisits the massacre at Jonestown on its 33rd anniversary. In November 1978, nearly 1000 bodies were found in an open field in a compound in Guyana, victims of a religious fanatic-turned-mass murderer who had forced them to drink poisoned Flavor Aid. They were members of the Peoples Temple, a supposedly peaceful, self-sufficient community run by Jim Jones, a former activist for integration and the temple's charismatic founder. As conditions in Guyana worsened, cult members' families in California asked Sen. Leo Ryan to visit the community; he arrived just before the massacre and was murdered by Jones's henchmen. Scheeres interviewed some of the few survivors not in the group that eventful morning. Her book is made up of their stories: how they were taken in by Jones only to be betrayed. VERDICT An evenhanded journalistic account of what happened, this should appeal to anyone who remembers Jonestown or is curious about it. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/25/11.]--Frances Sandiford, formerly with Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2011
Haunting account of the Peoples Temple, focusing on Jim Jones' many victims. Scheeres (Jesus Land: A Memoir, 2005) notes that her personal experience at a Christian reform school made her empathetic to the luckless individuals who died at the Jonestown settlement in Guyana, since derided as cultists or worse: "My aim here is to help readers understand the reasons that people were drawn to Jim Jones and his church." Accomplishing this goal with crisp prose and impressive research, she delivers a sort of '70s social thriller with the weight of onrushing tragedy. Scheeres dove into 50,000 pages of FBI documents, released to little fanfare, including diaries of true believers and reams of bizarre correspondence between Jones and his inner circle, proving that he was considering ways to kill his followers for years prior to the mass-murder suicide. Jones' early years remain confounding: He began preaching as a Pentecostal in Indiana in the 1950s, fighting for integration long before it was considered safe to do so. His apparent passion for social justice in these early years won him a devoted, largely African-American congregation. Upon moving to California in the late '60s, Jones cultivated ties to the state's power structure, which gave political cover to his increasingly wealthy and secretive church. "In the early days," write Scheeres, "there was a real sense of camaraderie in Jonestown"--but this changed after Jones arrived there permanently in 1977. By then, Jones had rejected most elements of mainstream Christianity in favor of something much darker; he'd become obsessed with "revolutionary suicide," a concept advanced by Huey Newton, which Jones deliberately misinterpreted. Scheeres shows great compassion and journalistic skill in reconstructing Jonestown's last months and the lives of many Temple members (including a few survivors), showing the documents archived by the FBI "tell a nightmarish tale of…idealists who realized, too late, that they were trapped." Well-written, disturbing tale of faith and evil.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2011
Initially doing research for a work of fiction about a fanatical Indiana preacher, Scheeres' access to newly released FBI files inspired her to chronicle Jim Jones' Peoples Temple instead. How did a religion based at its outset on integration and empowerment eventually bring about the largest mass murder-suicide in modern history? Using information culled from video and sound recordings, journals, and interviews with survivors, Scheeres pieces together what reads like an incident-by-incident time line of the temple and its eventual fate at Jonestown. Scheeres' personal experience, reported in Jesus Land (2005), no doubt helped her to achieve exceptional insight into the peculiarity of the cult's behavior, yet this book includes nary a personal interjection or anecdote and feels sometimes hurried and too quickly wrapped up. The poverty of her resources is, of course, that the only interviewable witnesses are those who defected or escaped, and while it eventually becomes clear that Scheeres believes the almost 1,000 who died were victims of a hopeless situation, this stranger-than-fiction true story of great human interest is often lacking in humanity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)