Opening with a description of the gruesome scene that confronted U.S. troops after the mass deaths of Jonestown residents in 1978, this account delves into the history of Jim Jones and his cult. As a child, Jones was enamored of persuasive orators like Adolf Hitler and Pentecostal preachers; he honed his own speaking skills as an itinerant preacher who performed fake healings before opening his own integrated church, the Peoples Temple. As Peoples Temple became more demanding and controlling of its members, Jones dropped the “church” façade to focus on socialism. Addicted to drugs, he began using sex; violence; and elaborate, staged “healings” to control people. Fearing defections and negative press, Jones sent his followers to Guyana, to build Jonestown. While life in the commune had its joyful moments, fear and violent coercion roiled beneath the surface. When Congressman Leo Ryan traveled to Jonestown to investigate, he was assassinated at the nearby airstrip. The Peoples Temple came to an end with the mass murders and coerced suicides of more than 900 of its members, over 200 of them children. This well-researched account drawing on archival photographs, recordings, and survivors’ accounts does not sensationalize the tragedy but speaks of the deceased with dignity and respect, asserting that they were average human beings under the powerful influence of a charismatic criminal. Many of Jones’s followers were Black women; racial dynamics, such as Jones’s imitations of Black preachers and the way he used his privilege to manipulate Black members, are clearly illuminated. (Age 14 and older)

How did Jim Jones, the leader of Peoples Temple, convince more than 900 of his followers to commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced punch? From a master of narrative nonfiction comes a chilling chronicle of one of the most notorious cults in American history.

Using riveting first-person accounts, award-winning author Candace Fleming reveals the makings of a monster: from Jones’s humble origins as a child of the Depression… to his founding of a group whose idealistic promises of equality and justice attracted thousands of followers… to his relocation of Temple headquarters from California to an unsettled territory in Guyana, South America, which he dubbed "Jonestown”… to his transformation of Peoples Temple into a nefarious experiment in mind-control.

And Fleming heart-stoppingly depicts Jones’s final act, persuading his followers to swallow fatal doses of cyanide—to “drink the kool-aid,” as it became known—as a test of their ultimate devotion.

Here is a sweeping story that traces, step by step, the ways in which one man slowly indoctrinated, then murdered, 900 innocent, well- meaning people. And how a few members, Jones' own son included, stood up to him... but not before it was too late.