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SCRATCHED BOOKS. NEARLY NEW BOOKS.
Thousands of great books from
The University of Georgia Press
at obscenely low prices.
NOVEMBER 10 & 11
★ Thursday: 9:00 am to 4:30 pm ★
(open to the public, no dealers)
★ Friday: 9:00 am to 12:00 pm ★
(open to the public, no dealers)
★ 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm ★
(open to the public; dealers welcome, check in at registers)
Tate Student Center Plaza
The University of
GEORGIA
■■■■PRESS
www.ugapress.org
IlilW 8iST MUSICAL
Mnding where you belong.
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Thursday, November 17 * 7:30 plm
Tickets on Sale Now!
Call, click or stop by the Box Office
706.357.4444 • www.ClassicCenter.com
300 N. Thomas St • Downtown Athens
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*• Kigions
STRANDED IN THE JUNGLE
God has no body, at least not one that we
can discern. Depending on your point of view,
either God stands at a remove, beyond mat
ter and tangibility and perception, or God is
in everything, existing on the far-flung edges
of the expanding universe and in every sub
atomic particle. Or God has no body because
He doesn't exist except as an object of wish-
fulfillment and a weapon of control in the
hands of ambitious men.
Whatever we may believe, God is not some
old guy sitting on a cloud in the sky. The
idea that God made man "in His image" is
pure metaphor, either a lodestone of hope to
inspire us to grow in our knowledge and thus
be closer to God, as the alchemists believed,
or a rationale to justify the eminent-domain
policy of humankind as regards the rest of
the planet—i.e., "We are more like God than
sloths and parakeets, and, therefore, we get
to run things." It’s a massive rationalization,
of course, useful only to ourselves. Sloths and
parakeets couldn't care less what we believe,
so we tell it to each other, fill books with it,
J build temples to it and pay hom
age to it. Those people who tell
the story most convincingly get to
i be in charge of the others, because
: of all the people who resemble
! God, priests and pastors are the
| resembliest. Occasionally, one or
another of them starts feeling his
oats and tries to pass himself off
os God, so resembly is he, and
that's when real trouble starts.
Much ink has been spilled about
the Reverend Jim Jones, the char
ismatic leader of the nondenomi-
national People's Temple church,
who led almost a thousand fol
lowers into the jungles of Guyana
and descended into madness, cul
minating in the assassination of a
visiting U.S. Congressman and the
mass murder-suicide (via poisoned
fruit punch) of almost everyone in
the compound in late 1977. There
was a horrifying made-for-TV movie
starring Powers Boothe as Jones.
The Vapors had a minor hit with a
song about him. The phrase "drink
ing the Kool-Aid" has entered the
vernacular to describe any sort
of self-destructive, lemming-like
behavior en masse.
While Jones has the same draw
as Charles Manson for people seeking to stare
into the face of insensate, charismatic evil
(you can tell many of these seekers by their
dead eyes and Slipknot T-shirts), very little
has been said about the people who flocked to
Jones' side and were sacrificed to his apoca
lyptic visions. Roundly dismissed as dupes and
born victims, the people of Jonestown have
always been bit players in the Jim Jones story.
But as Julia Scheeres, author of A Thousand
Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception
and Survival at Jonestown (Simon & Schuster,
2011), puts it, "Nobody ever sets out to join
a cult." Scheeres, whose previous book was
the wildly popular memoir Jesus Land, delved
deep into the 5,000-plus documents rele?-ed
by the FBI following its ! .vest.;, .to
the Jonestown massacre and came away with
a vital and harrowing grunt-level view of the
people of the People's Temple.
Some knew Jones as a Pentecostal min
ister on local Kansas TV in the 1950s, some
responded to him as an activist leader who
defiantly integrated his congregation, some
were touched by him as a potent faith-healer,
and some rallied to him as a socialist saint
with a vision of a hard-won utopia to be
carved by faith out of the South American
rainforest. None of them had an inkling that
Jones was a closet megalomaniac degenerat
ing into a drug-fueled paranoia until they
found themselves as exiles and prisoners,
working themselves to death while Jones
broke up their families, excoriated them for
imagined betrayals and lapses of faith, and
proclaimed himself God, a God with a growing
fixation on mass suicide.
By wrangling the scant journals and letters
of the victims and testimonies of the few sur
vivors of Jonestown, Scheeres has assembled
a picture of daily horror that is vivid with
detail—you can practically feel every jungle
bug on your skin and taste the colonists' slim
rations of rice and green beans—and rife with
dread. Every escape attempt and every effort
to avoid the pervasive threat of thoughtcrime
is cinematic in its depiction. A Thousand Lives
is an indispensable addition to the literature
of mass mania, a story that places the focus
of the tragedy in Guyana where it rightfully
belongs, not with the hypnotic evil of Jim
Jones but with the plight of his victims, who
had all the best intentions but ended up fol
lowing the wrong God down the rabbit hole.
Local Lit News: The weekend of Nov. 3-6,
Georgia author Joe Samuel Starnes will be
reading from his new novel Fall Line (New
South Books, 2011) at Barnes & Noble and at
the Grady School of Journalism. A novel about
the effects of a manmade lake on the residents
of a rural Georgia community in the 1950s,
Starnes' book is gaining some serious atten
tion for its authenticity and lyrical evocation
of the hinterlands of our state in one of its
most volatile times. Check out www.newsouth-
books.com or call Barnes & Noble at (706)
354-1195 for more details.
John G. Nettles
JULIA SCHEERES ♦
,\Vzv )'ork Times bestselling author
oi‘JESUS LAND
12 FLAGPOLE.COM -NOVEMBER 2.2011
