The world recoiled from the holocaust of Jonestown in disbelief. How could it have happened, this wholesale possession of intelligent and sensitive human beings in the grip of a mad messiah, even over the brink of self-annihilation? Not any of the several books given to us so far about Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple have come close to answering that staggering question. This one does.

In My Father's House is, above all, the self-revelation of an American family—advantaged, sophisticated, successful—whose search for the American Dream became a harrowing nightmare of victimization and desperate survival. The Layton story is at once extraordinary and universal, as it tells us of:

• The patriarch, Laurence, who came from fundamentalist Southern stock with a narrow, puritanical view of human morals to become an eminent research scientist, and a paterfamilias hard put to cope with the effects on his children of changing social standards.
  
• The mother, Lisa, daughter of a cultured German family, who fled the threat of the Nazi concentration camps only to die in the jungle camp of Jonestown, having transferred over a quarter of a million dollars of family savings to Peoples Temple.
  
• The daughter Debbie, an uncontrollable child who became a sexual victim of Jones and one of his most trusted aides, before managing a perilous escape from Guyana and trying to awaken the American public to the truth of Jonestown.
  
• And the son Larry, family pacifist and rebel without a cause until he met Jones, who despite incredible humiliations at Jones' hands remained loyal and, at the end, was (and still is) the only member of Peoples Temple held for and charged with the airport murders.

This is a book you will not only read; you will live it. Through passages of pleasure, pain, anger, and horror, through moments of deepest recognition and involvement. And you will never forget it.