The Road To Jonestown: Jim Jones And Peoples Temple (True Crime) by Jeff Guinn

Paperback:  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 travelled 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 (2017) is the definitive, comprehensive, authoritative, and tragic story of preacher Jim Jones, who was responsible for the Jonestown Massacre - the largest murder-suicide in American history - and the events that led to the tragedy at Jonestown.

About the author:  Jeff Guinn is the author of Manson:  The Life and Times of Charles Manson, The Last Gunfight:  The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral And How It Changed the American West, and Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie & Clyde, which was a finalist for an Edgar Award in 2010.  He was a longtime journalist who has won national, regional and state awards for investigative reporting, feature writing and literary criticism.  He has written sixteen books including New York Times bestsellers.  One of only 32 members of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, he lives in Fort Worth, Texas.