Product Review

This is the definitive work on the Guyana tragedy when on November 18, 1978, one thousand members of the Peoples Temple cult killed themselves in a Guyana jungle by drinking poison-laced Kool-Aid. Through the Freedom of Information Act, the author obtained more than 800 hours of tape recordings made in the jungle. Reston chronicles the descent into madness of the cult leader, the Reverend Jim Jones."Reston's eye is novelistic....His larger purpose is to make the terribly irrational somehow understandable....He does so with the good judgment of a writer willing to avoid certain faddish modes of analysis."-Robert Coles, Washington Post Book Review