The Road to Jonestown - Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

Jeff Guinn

Simon Schuster

2017

531 páginas

17h 42m

ISBN-13: 9781476763828

By the New York Times bestselling author of Manson, the comprehensive, authoritative, and tragic story of preacher Jim Jones, who was responsible for the Jonestown Massacre—the largest murder-suicide in American history.

In the 1950s, a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially integrated, and he was a much-lauded leader in the contemporary civil rights movement. Eventually, Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to northern California. He became involved in electoral politics, and soon was a prominent Bay Area leader.

In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing to the fraught decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November, 1978 when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink.

Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the case, including material released during the course of his research. He traveled to Jones’s Indiana hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed, and uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones’s orders. The Road to Jonestown is the definitive book about Jim Jones and the events that led to the tragedy at Jonestown.

Resenhas (69)

3.5 (Bom)

Esse livro só reforçou o que eu já achava antes, que o Jim Jones é um cara completamente surtado.
Mas, na minha opinião, Jones é diferente de muitos líderes de cultos por aí, por que ele não era carismático, no começo até que podia ser, mas ele usa mais do medo e da chantagem pra segurar seus seguidores.
A história podia ser contada de uma forma mais direta e menos monótona, por que por vezes é muito arrastada e eu demorei bastante pra terminar esse livro.
A forma como Jones fez seus seguidores matarem seus próprios filhos e depois suicidarem não entra na minha cabeça, como que as pessoas seguem alguém até esse ponto, como que alguém consegue convencer outros a abandonarem tudo pra ir pro meio do nada. Sério, essa história é muito bizarra pra mim.