17 Books Like A Thousand Lives

Raven is the best, most comprehensive, and most thoroughly researched book on Jim Jones, Jonestown, and Peoples Temple. Reiterman is a fine investigative journalist who was part of a group to visit Jonestown, Guyana in November of 1978. The visitors included, among others, eight members of the press; Congressman Leo Ryan and his aide Jackie Speier; and thirteen representatives of the “Concerned Relatives,” their own name for the group. Every member of the group had defected from the Temple in San Francisco. Only some of these visitors—Reiterman and a few of the other journalists, Ryan and Speier, and a small number of the group of relatives—were finally and reluctantly admitted in by Jones, on the stern advice of Jones’s lawyers. The Concerned Relatives were there to see if—as they strongly suspected—those in Jonestown were being held against their will.  The journalists wanted to find the truth about life in the… show more.

Layton escaped, at great risk, to try to prevent the tragedy of Jonestown. Her book is the best book yet to read to see Jonestown and Jim Jones through the eyes of a survivor. Layton entered Jonestown (as did most of Ron’s and my students) later than early settlers, when the situation was getting more and more dire as Jones was deteriorating. 

Twenty-four at the time, Layton accompanied her mother, who believed Jones could cure her cancer. As Charles Krause says in the foreword, “Debbie quickly realized that she and the others had been deliberately deceived: Jonestown was essentially a concentration camp in the jungle.” Layton had been in the church since she was a teen. Jones had immediately recognized her intelligence and energy, and eventually made her one of his inner circle. When she left, he declared her a traitor. The book is fascinating and well written.

Woollett’s novel is based on much research on Peoples Temple and Jonestown. She came to the US from Australia for interviews with many survivors and others—including Ron Cabral and me because of our knowledge of the teenagers in the Temple. It’s a great read and adds much to the understanding of those who joined the Temple. Evelyn Lyndon (all the characters have fictional names except Jim Jones) is the “Beautiful Revolutionary” who, with her idealistic husband, joins the Temple and eventually becomes one of Jones’s mistresses. I recognize many of the book’s characters, sometimes two people rolled into one. Only in a novel could Woollett be in the minds of the characters she follows in this story, who are all believable and vividly drawn.

A nonfiction book that reads like a novel; I loved this book because it gave context to one of San Francisco’s darkest days. On November 27, 1978, California suffered a terrible blow as its beloved mayor, George Moscone, and its first openly gay Supervisor, Harvey Milk, were assassinated.

With its infamous ‘Twinkie defense,” the assailant, Dan White, attempted to convince the city that he was temporarily insane. I loved learning about the behind-the-scenes politics.

Of the dozens of cult memoirs I’ve read, I like this one best. Why? Because Hollenbach turns her cult experience into a thing of sensual beauty. She skillfully evokes the scrubby yet lush feeling of the land near Taos, New Mexico, where she spent five life-changing months.

She also conveys the romance of throwing herself into a daring experiment and the longings her cult experience did and didn't satisfy. Finally, she shows how any intelligent adult might surrender her sovereignty to an egomaniac—then compost that detour into fertilizer for her next phase.

After ten years in a political cult, Janja Lalich dove deep into research on Heaven's Gate. Then she set out to explain, in this book, how smart, driven people function under coercive control. 

The gist? While they keep their intelligence and capacity for achievement, they shrink the range within which they act and think.

Lalich's perspective helped me understand why my fellow ex-Zendiks and I had acquiesced to so much dumb shit. We weren't stupid or brainwashed—just trapped by bounded choice.

Also, I was delighted by her account of her own cult's implosion, crystallized in the moment when the leader pulls out a cigarette and no one offers a light. 

Fourteen months after leaving Zendik, still a true believer, I realized that I was not a fucked-up failure—Zendik was one fucked-up place. Then, reading Combatting Cult Mind Control, I saw how Zendik fit the cult pattern. How I'd fallen for yet another tired variation on an all too well-worn scheme.

In this book, Hassan adds to the foundation laid by his first book. Most notably, he lays out ways to approach cult members with curiosity, not judgment. Forget arguing and hole-poking, he says. Focus instead on offering unconditional love and letting them come to their own liberating conclusions at their own pace.

In fictional Union Grove, post-collapse, it takes a cult—the New Faith Church—to sustain a village. Equipped with social cohesion, ecstatic optimism, and shared purpose, the New Faithers come through for their neighbors in surprising and admirable ways.

I love this book because it shows the bright side of cult life. The New Faithers remind me of myself and my fellow Zendiks at our best. For all our failings, we sure did know how to band together to get shit done. 

The Road to Jonestown is a solid, comprehensive account of the long road that led Jim Jones and more than 900 of his followers to take their lives in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, by literally drinking the Kool-Aid.

What Guinn does well is show the early appeal of Jones’s church, its message of inter-racial harmony and social justice which attracted many idealistic young people as well as a substantial number of African-American followers. The book explains Jones’ repeated contacts with Father Divine and his Peace Mission movement.

Jones was a complex mix of charismatic preacher and flim-flam man – both deeply insecure and wildly grandiose with a pronounced tendency toward victimhood and paranoia which became increasingly pronounced as he led his group to its apocalypse. 

Someone once said that novels were for light summer reading by bourgeois ladies. W.G. Sebald may have shared this opinion. The latter preferred letters, notes, fragments and diaries. Similarly, Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-born, of Sephardi ancestry, German-speaking and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature, only ever wrote one novel. But his aphorisms, both long and short, are remarkable. He unearths forgotten writers, important ones that he had met, and he meditates on literary gossip and the remaining time in his life. Here’s an example: Klaus Mann’s last proposal: a mass suicide of writers (of the great names).