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Raven, by Tim Reiterman
May. 8th, 2010 05:05 pmRaven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People, by Tim Reiterman
One of my quirks: I am squeamish and easily frightened in general; I can't watch movies that are all gory or that are designed to make you jump, and most horror novels are also difficult to impossible for me to read. But I can read accounts of, say, the Charles Manson cult and murders right before bed with nary a qualm. In fact, I... enjoy them is kind of a ghoulish way of putting it, but I find them absolutely absorbing. (I suspect that growing up in a school run by a church that, um, bordered on the edge of cultlike fed my fascination.)
It was in that mindset that I went looking for more information about the People's Temple and Jonestown, site of an enormous and tragic mass suicide/murder. What I found was this book by Tim Reiterman, a journalist who researched the People's Temple and who was part of Congressman Leo Ryan's ill-fated visit to the jungle of Guyana and the People's Temple enclave, Jonestown.
This is not a small book. I read it on the Kindle, but in paper form it apparently runs nearly seven hundred pages, beginning with Jim Jones' childhood and ending with the mass suicide. On the way, it tracks the rise of the People's Temple, including biographical sketches of many of the participants: some of those sketches were necessary to the narrative (such as Tim and Grace Stoen, whose child—who Jim Jones claimed as his own—played a central role in the final tragedy), but some were not directly related. But I appreciated those, even though they made a long book even longer, because they really made me feel the disaster of their deaths. I spent a lot of the book chewing on my knuckles and thinking, "Oh, I hope he/she gets out before the end." Some of them did. Most didn't.
The other thing that the book is very good for is depicting the slow but steady way that a charismatic leader can take a group of people from an idea that is fairly normal (in this case, Christianity plus egalitarianism, social justice, and racial harmony) through intermediate stages to a bizarre conclusion (Jones depicted as God the Father, control of people via sex, beatings and humiliation of anyone who disagreed because they were 'elitists', and finally mass suicide/murder in the name of revolution).
This is not an easy book to read, because if you know anything about Jonestown, you can feel the weight of doom almost from the beginning. It's particularly hard to read about the journey the Concerned Relatives and Congressman Ryan make, knowing what the end result will be. But it's also fascinating, and very useful as a depiction of the psychology of charismatic leadership. (I also liked that, as tempting as it must have been, Reiterman refrained from armchair psychoanalysis. He gave details that you could draw conclusions from, but even when he mentioned Jones' delusions of grandeur and paranoia, he was quoting a psychiatrist who had actually examined Jones.)
Caveat: The book was originally published in 1982, and while I didn't notice anything egregious as regards mishandling of gender or race, it also wouldn't shock me if it was there.
Recommended, but only if you're in a buoyant mood.
One of my quirks: I am squeamish and easily frightened in general; I can't watch movies that are all gory or that are designed to make you jump, and most horror novels are also difficult to impossible for me to read. But I can read accounts of, say, the Charles Manson cult and murders right before bed with nary a qualm. In fact, I... enjoy them is kind of a ghoulish way of putting it, but I find them absolutely absorbing. (I suspect that growing up in a school run by a church that, um, bordered on the edge of cultlike fed my fascination.)
It was in that mindset that I went looking for more information about the People's Temple and Jonestown, site of an enormous and tragic mass suicide/murder. What I found was this book by Tim Reiterman, a journalist who researched the People's Temple and who was part of Congressman Leo Ryan's ill-fated visit to the jungle of Guyana and the People's Temple enclave, Jonestown.
This is not a small book. I read it on the Kindle, but in paper form it apparently runs nearly seven hundred pages, beginning with Jim Jones' childhood and ending with the mass suicide. On the way, it tracks the rise of the People's Temple, including biographical sketches of many of the participants: some of those sketches were necessary to the narrative (such as Tim and Grace Stoen, whose child—who Jim Jones claimed as his own—played a central role in the final tragedy), but some were not directly related. But I appreciated those, even though they made a long book even longer, because they really made me feel the disaster of their deaths. I spent a lot of the book chewing on my knuckles and thinking, "Oh, I hope he/she gets out before the end." Some of them did. Most didn't.
The other thing that the book is very good for is depicting the slow but steady way that a charismatic leader can take a group of people from an idea that is fairly normal (in this case, Christianity plus egalitarianism, social justice, and racial harmony) through intermediate stages to a bizarre conclusion (Jones depicted as God the Father, control of people via sex, beatings and humiliation of anyone who disagreed because they were 'elitists', and finally mass suicide/murder in the name of revolution).
This is not an easy book to read, because if you know anything about Jonestown, you can feel the weight of doom almost from the beginning. It's particularly hard to read about the journey the Concerned Relatives and Congressman Ryan make, knowing what the end result will be. But it's also fascinating, and very useful as a depiction of the psychology of charismatic leadership. (I also liked that, as tempting as it must have been, Reiterman refrained from armchair psychoanalysis. He gave details that you could draw conclusions from, but even when he mentioned Jones' delusions of grandeur and paranoia, he was quoting a psychiatrist who had actually examined Jones.)
Caveat: The book was originally published in 1982, and while I didn't notice anything egregious as regards mishandling of gender or race, it also wouldn't shock me if it was there.
Recommended, but only if you're in a buoyant mood.
