A chilling account of one woman’s seven years in the Peoples Temple, culminating in the mass suicide just months after she escaped from the dystopian community of Jonestown. Layton was attracted to Jim Jones’s religious movement, as many were, for its radical teachings on interracialism and social justice. She joined in Berkeley at the tender age of 18, along with her mother (a Jew who had escaped Nazi Germany) and brother Larry. Layton quickly came to be a favorite of Jones’s. As a member of his inner circle, she saw a few things (such as his voracious sexual appetite) that made her secretly question him, though she remained faithful to his socialist vision. But in December 1977, when Layton and her mother traveled to the movement’s new headquarters in Jonestown, Guyana, they discovered appalling conditions, near-starvation, and physical abuse; Jonestown residents endured a living hell that more closely resembled an armed labor camp than a communal tropical paradise. Layton exploited Jones’s trust by fleeing to the American Embassy during a public relations trip to Georgetown, the Guyanese capital. She was granted asylum in May 1978, and within weeks, she was speaking openly in the US about her experiences in the cult—including the mass-suicide practice drills that Jones put them through. It was Layton’s reports that inspired Congressman Leo Ryan to undertake his own investigative trip to Guyana. Ryan and several press members were assassinated, and Jones then made good his plans for mass suicide. More than 900 perished. Layton’s brother is still serving a prison sentence for his role in the attack on Ryan’s party. Her mother died of cancer just days before the tragedy (though she died without pain medication, which Jones had confiscated for his own —needs—). Truly unforgettable. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour; television satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-48983-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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