Jim Jones was in many ways a product of our culture. He took what was trendy and popular and used it to get a free pass in his twisted need to control others and validate himself. This book is well researched but a bit of a slog. Healthy skepticism would have possibly protected most of his utopian hungry victims, something we are in short supply of even today. I would argue that Jones really was a man of the left although he garnered victims from both left and right. ( )

The saga of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple is unaccountably bizarre in every respect, from Jones' shady beginnings as a street preacher in 1940s Indiana to the apparently senseless horror of Jonestown three decades later. There are many lingering questions about Jones and his quasi-Marxist church; unfortunately, the answers are nowhere to be found in Raven. It's a monster of a book (nearly seven hundred pages), and it does dispel the popular misconception of Jones' followers as mindless fanatics by painting a sympathetic group portrait of them as the human beings they actually were, but Tim Reiterman glosses over numerous strange events in Jones' life, thereby reducing the story to a real-life soap opera about a megalomaniac and his tragically misguided disciples.

Is it possible that Jones' long association with CIA undercover operative Dan Mitrione meant nothing? Yes, but Reiterman doesn't even mention Mitrione. 913 Americans died at Jonestown (the heaviest loss of American civilian lives prior to 9/11), but the U.S. State Department proposed burying all the bodies in a mass grave in Guyana and, even when the bodies wound up being flown back home for burial, balked at performing autopsies. Why? The drugs that Jones used to weaken the resistance of his followers happen to have been the same substances used on unwilling test subjects by the CIA in its MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. How did Jones obtain such large quantities of these drugs? Why did the State Department refuse to intervene at Jonestown even after numerous reports of abuse (including a sworn affidavit from a former member of Peoples Temple) had emerged? The ingestion of cyanide causes violent convulsions, so how had the bodies come to be arranged in neat, face-down rows by the time they were photographed? Is it just a coincidence that Congressman Leo Ryan, a vocal critic of the CIA, was assassinated in this setting?

The author (one of the journalists who accompanied Ryan to Guyana, and who survived the airstrip shooting that killed Ryan and four others) never really addresses these mysteries. He's a good writer and a determined researcher, but he's also selective: of far more interest to Reiterman than the troubling inconsistencies of the official Jonestown narrative are Jones' slow psychological dissolution and the personal histories of his followers. Do these things belong in the book? Of course they do, and quite often they make for engrossing reading (which is why I've given Raven a four-star rating). But they don't tell the whole story. Bearing that in mind, Reiterman's account is still a good place to start if you're new to the subject. ( )

The Jonestown Massacre gave me nightmares as a sixteen year-old and it still has the ability to haunt today. This eyewitness account of the tragedy and the long chain of bizarre events that led up it answers every question but one - how could such a sick, paranoid megalomaniac get such a complete grip on the lives of others? The only answer to that question remains unsatisfactory but it's the only answer - there's a lot of stupid, gullible, needy people out there who will believe anything.

For those of us who lived through those times it's almost a requirement to ask who was the bigger madman, Jones or Manson? For my money, it's Jim Jones. ( )

Interesting interview with Reiterman and Deborah Layton, author of [b:Seductive Poison A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple|345220|Seductive Poison A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple|Deborah Layton|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173919622s/345220.jpg|1537530] on KQED. Reminded me of a very important book I read several years ago by John Hall [b:Gone from the Promised Land Jonestown in American Cultural History|470329|Gone from the Promised Land Jonestown in American Cultural History|John Hall|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175029543s/470329.jpg|458635], an excellent book.

Fascinating historical account of the history of Jim Jones from childhood, through his early adulthood as a charismatic pastor in suburban Indianappolis, to becoming a cult leader in California, and then in British Guyana. Written by one of the San Francisco Chronical reporters who accompanied Congressman Ryan down to "Jonestown" in his fateful trip of November 1978, which resulted in a shootout which killed 5, and which caused Jones and his followers to commit mass-suicide. Ultimately 913 people died- the largest civilian loss of American lives up until 9/11.

Several points were very well-explored here: 1) Jones' transition gradually to become a paranoid autocrat with God-delusions; 2) the mechanisms with which Jones took over his followers' finances, got them to take responsibilites for crimes he engineered (extortion, election fraud, kidnapping, etc) and how he even took legal guardianship and custody of followers' children to prevent them from leaving the cult; and 3) the shocking relationship between Jones and several figures in high office in the 1970s. Apparently Jones' "Peoples' Temple" voted as a massive block, which got Muscone elected mayor of San Francisco in '76. The Peoples' Temple also had sway with the California governors, and even got Jones an audience with First Lady Ros Carter.

The tragedy of Jonestown is straight out of a horror movie, but it is really just the culmination of three decades of manipulation, deception and intimidation by Jones on everyone's life whom he touched. He is a first-order psychopath, up there with Hitler, Stalin and Mao. ( )