Odd thing. All three involve lots of killing and death. Nasty human beings are responsible in all three cases. But I decided to return Stephen King, and "read" the other two through: perhaps because real murder is too interesting to mess with fiction? Perhaps because King's story begins with the killing of a child, and that's too much to bear?
While this is my second book on Peoples' Temple, this one is more objective (by an outsider, Steven Guinn), and much more thorough in telling Jones' story. What is clear so far:
- Jones had great gifts. He was a talented leader, an energetic dynamo, and knew how to charm and bewitch with the best of them (and the worst). His empathy could seem quite real, and probably was. As a boy, he put together a baseball league, though he wasn't much of a player himself. Animals followed him around.
- His father, for whom he was named, was a truly sad character. Disabled by gas in WWI, after losing the ability to work, Jim Sr spent much of his time in a pool hall. Despised and slandered by wife and son alike, he was apparently not a bad guy.
- Jones' mother was the greater influence on the boy. She believed in socialism and reincarnation, was self-aggrandizing and contemptuous of those around her, who had no use for God. Ditto the son.
- Jones loved pageantry from an early age, whether that of churches, of Adolf Hitler, or of conducting funerals, if only for animals. (Which he did with great seriousness.)
- He was also quite voluble about sex.
- And a control freak.
- Jones somehow managed to run a "church" in the Disciples of Christ that attracted thousands of followers, without believing in God. He also worked "miracles" by fraud, yet may have been sincere in his appeals to socialism and equality. It seems unlikely, though, that the Church or such references to Christianity as he gave, were ever any more than a means to an end.
Anyway, as I said, so far the book is admirably objective and the story well-told. The exception is the occasional unwarranted over-generalization, like "Unlike other teachers, Jones spoke about topics that really mattered to his students."