Community Developments

In an earlier blog post, I looked at the Jonestown Massacre, Jim Jones, and Peoples Temple as covered in Jeff Guinn’s Road to Jonestown. As a long-time student of this event, I’ve read dozens of in-depth studies and articles, and listened to and watched hours of footage and audio related to this incident. If you have an interest in this shocking event, I’m suggesting you read the most comprehensive study on Jones and Peoples Temple, Tim Reiterman’s and John Jacobs’ Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Reiterman was a journalist with The San Francisco Examiner who had covered Peoples Temple and Jones for a few years while they were still in San Francisco, before he visited Jonestown as part of Congressman Leo Ryan’s ill-fated trip to the jungle compound on November 17-18, 1978. Reiterman was wounded in the attack that left Ryan and four others dead at the Port Kaituma Airstrip.   

Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People by Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs (available on OverDrive audio and in the library). Reiterman looks at Jones’ life from his Depression-era birth in Indiana until the Temple’s bitter cyanide-laced end in Guyana. Jones’ formative years featured many disturbing events that Reiterman was able to uncover in interviews with Jones’ childhood associates. He shows how once Jones decided to be a preacher, he was able to convince people to join his flock through a paranormal healing ministry, a concern for social justice and civil rights, socialism and communalism, and his powerfully charismatic preaching style. Reiterman also explores the stories of several members of the group – some who survived, some who defected early, some who escaped, and some who died at Jonestown. While Guinn’s study benefits from the passage of time and the discovery of some declassified FBI files, Reiterman’s work (published in 1982) is the one book I would recommend to anyone with more than a passing interest in this bizarre story. By the end, Jones was a drug-addicted paranoiac and Peoples Temple was no church at all, but an atheistic, Marxist-Leninst movement with a desire to immigrate to the Soviet Union. Many of the members had taken on Jones’ paranoia and believed that there were conspiracies against them from all over the world. Still, many more were not exactly willing participants in what was at the time considered a mass suicide.

Podcasts: The two I’m recommending are for people who would like a deeply comprehensive view of this story. Both are significant time commitments, but deeply educational.

Transmissions from Jonestown

• This is a deep-dive study of Peoples Temple with 21 episodes so far. The podcast features archival audio, original research and music, modern-day interviews with survivors and former members of the group, and researchers. The narrator digitized all of the tapes recovered from Jonestown that have been released by the FBI to the Jonestown Institute.

The MartyrMade Podcast: God’s Socialist: The Rise and Fall of Peoples Temple

• This 30 hour podcast series attempts to put Peoples Temple in the context of the early Marxist/Leninists, the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left, the Black Power movement, and the Radical Left of the 1960s and 1970s. This is an extremely informative study, and anyone wanting to know more about the aforementioned movements, beyond Peoples Temple, would benefit from a listen.    

- Adrian, Administrative Librarian for Materials Management

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