Volume 28, Number 15 · October 8, 1981
After Jonestown
By Diane Johnson
Our Father Who Art in Hell
by James Reston Jr.
Times Books, 338 pp., $16.95
The Children of Jonestown
by Kenneth Wooden
McGraw-Hill, 238 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Awake in a Nightmare—Jonestown: The Only Eyewitness Account
by Ethan Feinsod
Norton, 223 pp., $14.95
In My Father's House: The Story of the Layton Family and the Reverend Jim Jones
by Min S. Yee, by Thomas N. Layton
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 361 pp., $13.95
Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy
by Shiva Naipaul
Simon and Schuster, 336 pp., $13.95
The Strongest Poison
by Mark Lane
Dutton, 494 pp., $12.95
Oscar Wilde's remark about the death of Little Nell, that you have to be strong to read about it without laughing, suggests the qualities of character required to read the new books about Jonestown. The tone of so much accumulated pathos is finally blackly comic. Gone is the excited dismay that lent to the first books published about the events in Guyana an authenticity these more detailed and verified accounts seem to lack. After many retellings, the events of the suicide day take on a ritual, theatrical quality, like episodes in folk drama, with characters added, like Noah, for light relief.
Review, 2698 words
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