Our Father Who Art in Hell

Next month will mark the sad, tragic anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre. I refuse to call it a suicide since Jones orchestrated this horrible and awful event in which hundreds (over 900) were forced to drink poison to their deaths whether by force or brainwashed to do so. It wasn't just the vulnerable members but the authors explains the situation like the custody battle between ex-member Grace Stroen and Jones. She had a son with Jim Jones who carries her husband's name even though Jones was married to Marceline. Grace wanted her son back but Jones didn't want to have to answer to the authorities. The loss of one was like the loss of his entire flock. Rather than returning the child to his mother, he would hold hostage and convince his members that the world was seeking to destroy him and his people who had come to live in peace. Then there is the case of Jann Sturvich, a college student from a wealthy family, who ended up being among the hundreds of rotting corpses in Jonestown. She wanted to make the world a better place and ended up a victim of Jones' insecurities, madness, and manipulation. The book is hard to fathom because there is so much going on with Jim Jones who was pretty much dying himself. He was an absolute control freak who wanted control over his influence and among the press and politicians. Behind the dark glasses, the eyes were that of a human monster who would rather kill his own people who he claimed to love rather than set them free. You wonder about the what ifs too. The book does not have any pictures or maps but detailed descriptions from the author about the tragic events which unfolded on that hot November day almost thirty years ago. I think the world has dismissed the members as willing participants in their final act entitled revolutionary suicide. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They were all brought there under false pretenses, stripped of their identification, money, and the environment was harsh, brutal, hot, and unbearable. Jones would work his members and then they had to listen to his voice over the microphone all night long. There was no room to be free of thought when you were worked to death, malnourished, and paranoid of the other members who can betray the entire organization. The man who claimed to be their father, bishop, leader, had turned into their killer at the same time. He had robbed them more of their possessions but of their right to free will and thought without corrupting their minds. They didn't need the kool-aid poisoned drinks to be poisoned since he had poisoned their minds all along with lies, mis-truths, deceit, etc. Congressman Leo Ryan and the families of concerned members and the press came to rescue their people but it was in a sense too late. Those who were lucky enough to flee tried and some successfully. But hundreds of others had put their faith, trust, and love in a man who never returned his affections without scorn and scrutiny. The author here also writes

James Reston's "Our Father Who Art In Hell" is a well-written book that I consider THE book on Jim Jones, Jonestown and People's Temple. He has a very descriptive writing style that sets the various scenes not only physically, but emotionally. What I really enjoyed about the book is how he layers the goings on throughout. By now, we all know the story of Jones' "Church" moving from Indiana to Ukiah to San Francisco and eventually to Guyana. Each step along the way, he flashes forward and backward to emphasize different points he tries to make throughout the book. The book does follow a somewhat chronological order, and it really hooked me from page one. The only issue that I have with the book is through no fault of Reston's. Since the book initial publication, new information has been exposed through the Freedom of Information Act to disprove some of the facts Reston uses in the book, but when he wrote it, those were the facts that were provided. For example, he tells of how the keyboard player lightly plays a "death derge" during the final hours of Jonestown. Well, years later, audio experts declared the music heard on the top was simply music previously recorded on the tape at a higher speed. The tapes used in Jonestown were often re-used and there was some bleed-over effect. And since the music was recorded at a much higher speed than the "death tape" it sounds very slow and drawn out. All in all, this is an outstanding book. I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in learning or learning more about the events that took place in the jungles of Guyuna on that fateful day of Nov. 18, 1978.

I liked this book very much. The way I choose to praise it is to write down the text on its front and back flaps. I think it will help the reader to know if this book is what he/she is looking for: "Of the Jonestown Massacre, most people can recall the ghoulish photographs, the headlines that screamed of mass suicide in a tropical land. Later, the spectacular flowering of Jim Jones's People's Temple in the Indiana and California years would come to light. But the story no one knows - the jungle story, the descent of this diabolical American genius into madness and bestiality in the South American wilderness, and the lives and thoughts and choices, if any, of the 913 people who followed him there, ultimately to their deaths - has taken James Reston, Jr., two trips to Guyana, years of tireless research, and a legal suit against the U.S. government to uncover. With hundreds of original tapes, and revelatory first-hand interviews with survivors and relatives of the Jonestown dead, Our Father Who Art in Hell penetrates through to and lays vare the whole story. "Out of 'his vaulted sense of his own historical destiny', Jones taped the nightly Temple sessions in Guyana, tapes for which author Reston tenaciously fought the F.B.I. and the F.C.C. and to which he finally won exclusive access. Here, these never-before-seen texts are the riveting, terrifying testaments to the deterioration of a brilliant but increasingly ill and paranoid Jim Jones. A rich, unforgettable, and authentic portrait emerges of the charismatic preacher whose success was deeply rooted in the failure of the 1970s to fulfill the golden promise of the 60s; a man who brought his mammoth flock (he built the largest single Protestant movement in California's history) from the reality of the world into the jungle, and there descended into cruelty, madness, and finally murder. Startling new conclusions come forth from this material... including Jones's premeditation of his apocalypse three years before the event... and some provocative information about Mark Lane's role in Jonestown. "Of Jones's surviving followers, Reston says: 'They are far from robots they are portrayed to be. In their grief they are angry, some at Jones, most at the U.S. government. Jones touched their core of belief in an age of cynicism, and thereby made them vulnerable...' "As seductively beautiful and haunting as Joseph Conrad novel, James Reston's watershed 'novel in reality' makes understandable one of the most horrifying and bizarre events in American history. It should not be missed."