wow

Stories from Jonestown
by  Leigh Fondakowski


Wow. Wow. Wow.

I never knew.  I was old enough to be reading newspapers in 1978 but I didn't remember a thing.  At most I remembered that a bunch of people comitted suicide and that's not even a sound bite.  I certainly didn't remember why, and maybe we didn't know why, at the time.

Some of the why is here.  It purports to be a book of stories by survivors and I expected just that, personal stories of the time after that time,  but at about the halfway point it turned into a play-by-play description of the actual incident.  It sidetracked a little into the making of a play based on the incident, but there were plenty of personal stories, mostly from people who were in San Franscisco or other places around the world at the time of the incident.  As you read them, think, "This person could have been there.  And if he had, he'd be dead now."

What I wouldn't have given for a modern day forensic team to have visited the site before they moved the bodies.