A vivid, fascinating revisitation of a time and series of episodes fast receding into history even as their forgotten...
“Kool-Aid rather than equality is what the rest of the world remembers”—a searing account of what has since become a byword for religious cultism.
That Jim Jones (1931-1978) was a nut case—no term of psychiatric art but still true—was plain for most to see way back before he became infamous for the events of Nov. 18-19, 1978, when he and more than 900 of his followers died in their dystopian colony in the jungles of Guyana. Even so, Bay Area politicians gladly accepted his campaign contributions, some lauding him for his good works of social justice and concern for the poor. Those works and concern were genuine. Guinn (Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, 2013, etc.), who favors hard fact over psychobiographical speculation but indulges in a little of it all the same, notes that there was method to some of Jones’ madness, at least its less lethal manifestations. For instance, his Peoples Temple sermons in San Francisco were wandering, fuguelike, endless affairs, but they “deliberately rambled” to afford Jones the chance to embrace atheists, junkies, Marxists, Black Panthers, and anyone else who showed an interest in his cause, even as he referred to himself on the pulpit as “God, the reincarnation of Christ, or Lenin in a single turn.” Guinn does an excellent job of following Jones to the roots: a rural loner who became a genuine advocate for poor African-Americans, a searcher with a long interest in building a safe harbor for his followers (he even courted North Korea and the Soviet Union as possible homelands), and an all-around strange person with an endless appetite for drugs—“amphetamines and tranquilizers, pills and liquids to provide significant boosts of energy, or else slow down his racing imagination and allow him to rest”—and decidedly un-Christian patterns of behavior.
A vivid, fascinating revisitation of a time and series of episodes fast receding into history even as their forgotten survivors still walk among us.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6382-8
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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