This book is based on the only eyewitness account, never previously published, of one of the most dramatic and horrifying events of our times. On November 18, 1978, 914 men, women, and children—all but a few of them American citizens—died in a remote South American jungle settlement called Jonestown. Most died by their own hands, in the largest mass suicide in history.
The story of Jonestown is largely the story of the Reverend Jim Jones, messianic founder of the People's Temple. He was a spellbinding orator, a man with a vision of the perfect egalitarian society, but the tools of his control were deceit, humiliation, and sexual domination. It is also the story of people like Grover Davis, who saw Jones cure his wife's emphysema and followed him to Guyana because "I seen he had the power."
Whatever power Jones had, it became, finally, a negative force. Cut off from the outside world in the jungle, overwhelmed by paranoid fantasies about defectors, spies, and the enemies of Jonestown, Jones's last act was to persuade hundreds to share death with him.
One person who did not die was Odell Rhodes, a street-wise ex-drug addict who had helped build Jonestown out of the raw jungle. Rhodes watched his friends drink the poisoned punch and held their hands as they died, but would not drink the poison himself. He is one of only two actual witnesses who escaped, and through his exclusive interview material, author Ethan Feinsod reconstructs for us the compelling story of the last hours of Jonestown.