A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown Hardcover | Pages: 307 pages

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Title	:	A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown
Author	:	Julia Scheeres
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 307 pages
Published	:	October 11th 2011 by Free Press
Categories	:	Nonfiction. History. Crime. True Crime. Religion. Cults. Psychology. Mystery

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                                                            — Jim Jones, September 6, 1975

     In 1954, a pastor named Jim Jones opened a church in Indianapolis called People's 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. After Jones moved his church to Northern California in 1965, he became a major player in Northern California politics; he provided vital support in electing friendly political candidates to office, and they in turn offered him a protective shield that kept stories of abuse and fraud out of the papers. Even as Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers found it increasingly difficult to pull away from the church. By the time Jones relocated the Peoples Temple a final time to a remote jungle in Guyana and the U.S. Government decided to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late.
      A Thousand Lives follows the experiences of five People's Temple members who went to Jonestown: a middle-class English teacher from Colorado, an elderly African American woman raised in Jim Crow Alabama, a troubled young black man from Oakland, and a working-class father and his teenage son. These people joined the church for vastly different reasons. Some, such as eighteen-year-old Stanley Clayton, appreciated Jones’s message of racial equality and empowering the dispossessed. Others, like Hyacinth Thrash and her sister Zipporah, were dazzled by his claims of being a faith healer — Hyacinth believed Jones had healed a cancerous tumor in her breast. Edith Roller, a well-educated white progressive, joined Peoples Temple because she wanted to help the less fortunate. Tommy Bogue, a teen, hated Jones’s church, but was forced to attend services—and move to Jonestown — because his parents were members.
      A Thousand Lives is the story of Jonestown as it has never been told before. New York Times bestselling author Julia Scheeres drew from 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. Her own experiences at an oppressive reform school in the Dominican Republic, detailed in her unforgettable debut memoir Jesus Land, gave her unusual insight into this story. 
     The people who built Jonestown wanted to forge a better life for themselves and their children. They sought to create a truly egalitarian society. 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. Yet even as Jones resorted to lies and psychological warfare, Jonestown residents fought for their community, struggling to maintain their gardens, their school, their families, and their grip on reality.
     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.

Particularize Books Toward A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

Original Title:	A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown
ISBN:	1416596399 (ISBN13: 9781416596394)
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	San Francisco Book Festival Nominee for General Non-Fiction (Runner-Up) (2012), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for History & Biography (2011)

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Ratings: 3.98 From 4394 Users | 725 Reviews

Criticism Out Of Books A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

A compassionate account of the Jonestown tragedy, A THOUSAND LIVES humanizes the victims rather than painting them as stupid, docile, mindless pawns. Scheeres shows us exactly how the monumentally flawed Jones was able to draw them into his quest for a socialist/agrarian utopia, and then, in his growing drug addiction and paranoia, keep them isolated, scared, hungry, weak and tired enough to stay -- and eventually to die. This book is heartbreaking, disturbing and utterly fascinating.

This book follows the evolution of the People's Temple from a small church in Indianapolis all the way to the mass suicides in Guyana. It's, in general, a well-written book that lays out all the facts and most of the chronology. The progression is followed through a few select people's eyes - mostly survivors, but some others whose records allow them to tell their story from beyond the grave. The book doesn't pretend to be a biography of or psychological exploration of Jim Jones himself, which

Not the most comprehensive book on Jonestown but definitely the best at capturing the batshit crazy day-to-day life details of living under Jim Jones's control. Most books on Jonestown focus on Jim Jones, which is reasonable enough, but this one instead focuses on his victims/followers, a much-needed corrective to the usual narrative. I've read quite a bit on Jonestown and some of the stories and people introduced here were new to me.

Ugh. If you ever feel too happy and want to rectify that, read a book about Jonestown.I'll date myself by saying that I was a very young child when the massacre happened. It was the first real-time tragedy I had encountered, and I was astounded that parents would kill their own children. I'm still astounded really, but this book (using declassified FBI documents) follows the members of this church throughout its development to show how vulnerable most of the people were who died in Jonestown.

I love socialism, and Im willing to die to bring it about, but if I did, Id take a thousand with me. Im here to tell you right now that if you read this book, youll never look at religious prophets the same way ever again. But at the same time, its a book that demands to be read, especially at a time like this.Back in the 1950s, a young preacher named Jim Jones started a church in Indianapolis. It quickly grew due to its welcoming nature of all people of races and colors in a time when it was

Like many people born in 1980 or later, I grew up with a vague notion of Jonestown as a weird town in a jungle where a bunch of people in a cult drank poison Kool-Aid and died. I use the term drink the Kool-Aid when I refer to someone completely buying in to an idea or a cause. But until I read this book, I never really knew what Jonestown was all about.Scheeres provides a service in this book, both as a skillful historian and as a compassionate human being. She synthesizes hours of audio

Beyond conducting survivor interviews, Scheeres pieced together diary entries, letters, depositions, FBI interviews, and numerous tape recordings found at Jonestown to give us an in-depth look at the Peoples Temple, largely focusing on details about certain members. These accounts provide explicit information Id never read before. It was totally horrifying to learn details of how the revolutionary suicide was carried out and just how erratic a doped up Jim Jones had become. The survivor stories