Stories from Jonestown

This book chronicles the multi-year journey of playwright Leigh Fondakowski and her team as they interview and collect the survivor stories and artifacts of Jonestown to write a play about the Peoples Temple movement. Like most people, I started my reading with a limited understanding of the story, believing it to be about all those people who committed mass suicide with their whackadoodle leader, Jim Jones, in jungles of Guyana. What I wasn't expecting was the emotional impact of hearing the viewpoints and backstories of actual past members of Peoples Temple and the survivors of the infamous events of November 18, 1978. It was easier to just think it would be a story about gullible people who were duped by a crazy man and "drank the Kool-Aid" willingly than to see them as intelligent, thoughtful, idealistic people with hopes and dreams for a better world that were victimized not only by Jim Jones, but by their own beliefs. I no longer believe that the majority of these people committed "revolutionary suicide" as Jim Jones tried to indoctrinate them to do, but rather found themselves trapped in an inescapable nightmare, far from the utopia they were promised, that ultimately resulted in their murders. I could sympathize with the survivors who found it easier to stay silent about their experience over the decades than risk the judgement and misunderstanding of a world that wrote them off as villains and murderers, without knowing their actual stories. It doesn't exonerate the survivors entirely, but it certainly humanizes them, as one is left with the feeling that their experience could be any one of ours under the right circumstances. Really a fascinating, heartbreaking and uplifting journey, and one that has the potential to teach empathy if the reader will allow it.

★★★★ 

You can find this and all my other reviews at: https://www.goodreads.com/curious-kat