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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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