Most of us are guilty of using the phrase "Don't drink the Kool-Aid." The punchline conceals the horror of the last act of Jim Jones Peoples Temple, a mass suicide which claimed 918 lives (including the ambush of Congressman Leo Ryan's party) in the jungles of Guyana. This book traces how a boy from small town Indiana became a preacher, a prophet, and then engineered a mass suicide. It's a fascinating journey, and Guinn does it with as little judgement as possible.

The young Jim Jones was a boy apart. His mother was an ardent noncomformist who believed that her son was destined for the great things she never accomplished. His father was a gassed veteran of WW1, tragically weak. Jim's mother raised him to believe in radical socialism, and his own importance. His peers from around Lynn, Indiana remembered a strange boy, fascinated by itinerant preachers, holding funerals for dead animals, and yet oddly manipulative and cruel.

In his early 20s, Jim started his ministry in Indianapolis, focusing on the black minority. The Peoples Temple (the name comes from the former synagogue building that served as its first home) focused on pragmatic matters, helping parishioners deal with bills, the courts, and an uncaring white world. Jones also hit the gospel circuit as well, 'prophesying' with the techniques of cold reading, and graduating to 'healings' where confederates pretending to pass "tumors" (actually rotten chicken offal).

The contradiction was at the heart of Jones's career. On the one hand, he was sincere in his belief in integration and socialism at a time when these things were wildly unpopular in America. The Peoples Temple provided real services for people, and really integrated themselves. On the other hand, for Jones the means justified the end, and chicanery and even Christianity themselves were tools to be used to further his true ends.

As Jones moved from Indiana to California, those ends became less about the mission, and more about himself. Always energetic and unwilling to delegate, Jones became increasingly authoritarian and paranoid. He urged members to 'go communal', turning over their property to the Temple. As he preached abstinence, he began taking mistresses from the faithful, and abusing amphetamines and barbiturates. A series of defections from highly placed lieutenants, including the Stoerns (Tim was Jones lawyer, Grace the mother of one of his children) made Jones paranoid.

He'd long dreamed of promised land, outside American jurisdiction, but the custody fight over the Stoerns' child prompted an immediate exodus to Guyana. The Guyanese government thought a settlement of Americans could act as a buffer against expansionist Venezuela on their remote frontier. Jones thought that the settlement could serve as a socialist utopia.

At this point, Jones really was under attack, from muckraking journalists and the Concerned Relatives, but he saw himself as at the epicenter of a massive conspiracy, involving the CIA, FBI, and shadowy mercenaries. As the Peoples Temple struggled to carve fields and homes out of the jungle, Jones degenerated further, seeing enemies everywhere, his once inspirational sermons degenerating into rants broadcast throughout the complex on speakers, and staging terrifying 'White Nights', where he rehearsed his plan for mass suicide, a final act of revolutionary martyrdom.

Guinn does his best to write without passing judgement, but from my perspective, it's impossible to separate the good Jones from the bad Jones. The same energy and self-assurance required to integrate in Indiana in 1961 are the qualities that lead him to see enemies everywhere. The bravery to fight social convention was in this one case, a slippery slope that started with false miracles and ended with demanding mass death. Jones appeal to peoples' better natures, but he couldn't defeat the darkness within.