A poignant reminder of the Jonestown madness and the lives it destroyed.
The victims of one of the most bizarre tragedies in American history, the mass suicide of 909 members of the San Francisco–based People’s Temple Christian Church in their jungle compound, are memorialized in this haunting photo album.
The People’s Temple preached a strange mixture of Pentecostal Christianity, doctrinaire communism, and messianic worship of the charismatic Rev. Jim Jones, who was a politically influential civil rights and anti-poverty activist even as he exercised a secretive, paranoid, and abusive control over his flock. Negative press reports sent him into voluntary exile at the Temple’s “Jonestown” plantation in Guyana, where he subjected his followers to Soviet propaganda films and rambling monologues on the conspiracies he thought were targeting them. After Jones’ “Red Brigade” security guards killed Congressman Leo Ryan and four other members of a delegation that arrived to investigate Jonestown, Jones ordered his followers, including nearly 300 children, to commit suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid drinks. (A chillingly calm “death tape” recorded Jones and other Temple stalwarts exhorting parents to poison their kids—and parents applauding the speeches.) Barbour, who knew some of the victims before they went to Guyana, gives few details of these events in her slender commemorative volume, focusing instead on simply naming the dead and presenting their portraits, mostly taken from passport photos. The roster ranges from 2-month-old Charles Henderson to 97-year-old Ever Rejoicing and includes Jones and other perpetrators along with innocents. Ironically, given Jones’ fulminations against racism and sexism, the victims were mostly African-American and many were female. Barbour intends the book mainly as a historical document and an aid to families (she includes forms for readers to contact her about misidentifications), but in these artless photos, the victims’ humanity—smiling, hopeful, unguarded—shines through. She adds no commentary or editorializing, but the mere alphabetical arrangement, of, say, the Baisy family—mother Shirley and six kids—conveys the loss with heartbreaking eloquence.
A poignant reminder of the Jonestown madness and the lives it destroyed.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-692-32813-2
Page Count: 102
Publisher: KatBard Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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