After Jesus Land, her memoir of growing up with fundamentalist parents who sent her and her brother to a brutal Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic, Julia Scheeres started a novel about a charismatic Indiana preacher, basing the character on Rev. Jim Jones. But when she learned the FBI had released documents and audiotapes found in Jonestown, she began A Thousand Lives--a meticulously researched history of Jones's Peoples Temple and those who entrusted their lives to its maniacal leader.
More than three decades after Jones orchestrated the murder/suicide at his Guyana compound that claimed 978 lives, his fervent desire is realized: he is still remembered. But the power of this telling is in Scheeres's chronological description of how others came to believe; how Jones seduced not only church members but elected leaders; how threats and violence kept his followers subdued. "While the phrase 'drinking the Kool-Aid' has entered the cultural lexicon, its reference to gullibility and blind faith is a slap in the face of the Jonestown residents who were goaded into dying by the likes of Jim Jones," she writes. Besides the FBI files, she cites journal entries, letters and interviews with survivors and families to flesh out the lives of Jones's followers, "idealists [who] believed in a dream." We come to know and care for these victims, including Hyacinth Thrash, who was originally drawn to Jones in 1955 by his integrated choir; 23 years later, she followed him to Jonestown and was one of the few who survived.
Julia Scheeres's sensitive and detailed account of the Jonestown horror is compelling nonfiction and a significant contribution to understanding "Why?" --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller