The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

Guinn traces Jim Jones from his Indiana childhood through the church's progressive idealism to Guyana and the murder of 918 people. What the book refuses to do is make Jonestown simply the story of a madman. The People's Temple was a genuine civil rights organisation. The people who followed Jones were not fools — they were idealists who trusted a man who was destroying himself. That is the real horror.