The Jonestown Massacre was the single most deadly non-natural disaster that occurred until 9-11 with a death toll of 918 people; and occurred on November 18, 1978. Jonestown, a so-called utopia formed by Jim Jones, which became a mass-suicide by consuming cyanide. A Utopia where the Congregation of The People’s Temple in Indianapolis, moved with Jones to South America to live out their vision of a communist community where each and every individual lived in peace and harmony and set out for the greater good. Although that is not how it played out for The People’s Temple. Depicted in Julia Scheeres book, A Thousand Lives, an entirely new light is shed on the Massacre. In the following review I will include a summary of the book A Thousand Lives,…show more content… Jones, with a drug addiction, controlled his followers with sex, and physical abuse, regardless of age gender or race. Without Jones’ political ties in both Guyana and the US, he would not be able to keep his operations moving along. The Bitter truth was that over 1/3 of the people Jones massacred, were in fact children. With his use of threat and physical force Jones was able to keep the members of his congregation in line, not allowing them to leave the grounds of their confines and murder them. Scheeres was able to portray the reasoning that Jones’ followers were inclined to following him throughout their stories. Speaking out against racism and segregation, including speaking out and promoting equal rights in an admirable way, it is obvious during this period why these members would be so drawn to his congregation; and in fact about 70% of his members were African…show more content… Scheeres realizes how easy it could be to refer to all his followers as a cult, and she goes far out of her way to not refer to them as such. She believes that these people were lead into something they had no intentions of doing, these people were not crazy and didn’t act stupid based on their own beliefs, but were forced to act out based on someone else’s beliefs. Her book follows a retelling of the timeline of events that had occurred, and she manages to bring these five characters back to life through her findings. She touches on the circumstances that lead all these people to the church, which seemed to be based around community acceptance in some way shape, or