Volume 26, Number 6 · April 19, 1979
Heart of Darkness
By Diane Johnson
The Suicide Cult: The Inside Story of the Peoples Temple Sect and the Massacre in Guyana
by Marshall Kilduff, by Ron Javers
Bantam, 201 pp., $2.50 (paper)
Guyana Massacre: The Eyewitness Account
by Charles A. Krause, with Lawrence M. Stern, by Richard Harwood, by Frank Johnston
Berkley, 210 pp., $2.50 (paper)
Hold Hands and Die!: The Incredibly True Story of the People's Temple and the Reverend Jim Jones
by John Maguire, by Mary Lee Dunn
Dale Books, 271 pp., $2.50
Six Years With God: Life Inside Reverend Jim Jones' Peoples Temple
by Jeannie Mills
A & W Publishers, 320 pp., $12.95
Any spectacle of human credulity is painful. Now, three months after the terrible deaths in Guyana, nearly two thirds of the bodies still lie unclaimed, unwanted, unburied, in some government depot under a Polynicean gloom of disapproval—in a mood, even, of unspoken anger that has stolen in upon the dismay and pity of the first days. Imagine parents who could kill their own children, people say now. We feel now that those people were fools, and fools could be us, and so we are anxious to know what happened, how it could happen. You can't know the moral of a story until you know the whole plot.
Review, 5054 words
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