This account succeeds as a moving tribute to Temple students rather than as a key contribution to Jonestown history.
Two former teachers at a school attended by Peoples Temple members try to make sense of the Jonestown tragedy in this debut book.
In 1976, Opportunity II, a new alternative high school in San Francisco, got an unexpected influx of students as 120 teenagers from a church called Peoples Temple signed up for classes. The newcomers “looked more like well-scrubbed country kids than hardened urban teens,” the authors recall. Just over two years later, many of those students would perish in the mass suicide at Jonestown, the Guyana encampment where the Temple’s charismatic but paranoid founder, Jim Jones, had retreated with his followers. Bebelaar and Cabral have now delivered a book that functions more as an homage to their former students than a window into what drove them and so many others to perish in the South American jungle: “We would like to think that the teenagers we knew...can help make Jonestown more than...a tale often reduced to the dismissive phrase coined from the tragedy: ‘To drink the Kool-Aid.’ ” The Temple teens at Opportunity II included three of Jones’ sons—Stephan, Jimmy, and Tim—and while the pupils tended to keep to themselves, some of them contributed poems to Bebelaar’s creative writing class. “I do not like anybody to see / me talk to myself / because I might say / the wrong thing,” one student wrote eerily. There were glimpses of the darkness surrounding the church—Cabral noticed one girl “had bruises on both arms and a blackening eye”—but neither author was prepared for the controversy that erupted after New West Magazine reported abuse at the Temple in 1977. Bebelaar “couldn’t help thinking she and the other teachers should have asked more questions.” Much of the book’s latter part is an account of the church’s spiral into madness that relies heavily on secondary sources like Julia Scheeres’ A Thousand Lives without adding much insight into the motivations and events that led to the tragedy. Still, the volume offers some haunting details. Bebelaar caught up with Stephan Jones, who was at a basketball tournament when the mass suicide occurred. “I believe that some of us had the means to stop the terrible things that happened,” he told her, “but we didn’t get it done.”
This account succeeds as a moving tribute to Temple students rather than as a key contribution to Jonestown history.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9987096-8-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sugartown Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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