Product Review

Hearing the Voices of Jonestown restores the individual voices that have been erased so that we can better understand what was created - and destroyed - at Jonestown, and why. Piecing together information from interviews with former group members, archival research, and diaries and letters of those who died there, Mary McCormick Maaga describes the women leaders as educated political activists who were passionately committed to achieving social justice through communal life. Maaga's book analyzes the historical and sociological factors which, she states, contributed to the mass suicide, such as growing criticism from the larger community and the influx of an upper class, educated leadership that eventually became more concerned with the symbolic effects of the organization than with the daily lives of its members.