This account succeeds as a moving tribute to Temple students rather than as a key contribution to Jonestown history.
Two former teachers at a school attended by Peoples Temple members try to make sense of the Jonestown tragedy in this debut book.
In 1976, Opportunity II, a new alternative high school in San Francisco, got an unexpected influx of students as 120 teenagers from a church called Peoples Temple signed up for classes. The newcomers “looked more like well-scrubbed country kids than hardened urban teens,” the authors recall. Just over two years later, many of those students would perish in the mass suicide at Jonestown, the Guyana encampment where the Temple’s charismatic but paranoid founder, Jim Jones, had retreated with his followers. Bebelaar and Cabral have now delivered a book that functions more as an homage to their former students than a window into what drove them and so many others to perish in the South American jungle: “We would like to think that the teenagers we knew...can help make Jonestown more than...a tale often reduced to the dismissive phrase coined from the tragedy: ‘To drink the Kool-Aid.’ ” The Temple teens at Opportunity II included three of Jones’ sons—Stephan, Jimmy, and Tim—and while the pupils tended to keep to themselves, some of them contributed poems to Bebelaar’s creative writing class. “I do not like anybody to see / me talk to myself / because I might say / the wrong thing,” one student wrote eerily. There were glimpses of the darkness surrounding the church—Cabral noticed one girl “had bruises on both arms and a blackening eye”—but neither author was prepared for the controversy that erupted after New West Magazine reported abuse at the Temple in 1977. Bebelaar “couldn’t help thinking she and the other teachers should have asked more questions.” Much of the book’s latter part is an account of the church’s spiral into madness that relies heavily on secondary sources like Julia Scheeres’ A Thousand Lives without adding much insight into the motivations and events that led to the tragedy. Still, the volume offers some haunting details. Bebelaar caught up with Stephan Jones, who was at a basketball tournament when the mass suicide occurred. “I believe that some of us had the means to stop the terrible things that happened,” he told her, “but we didn’t get it done.”
This account succeeds as a moving tribute to Temple students rather than as a key contribution to Jonestown history.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9987096-8-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sugartown Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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