16 books like The Road to Jonestown

This biography of Joseph Smith although first published nearly eighty years ago is still the best account of the founder of Mormonism. It caused a sensation when it came out in 1945.

Its author, the 30-year-old Fawn Brodie, member of a prominent Mormon family, was excommunicated by the Church of Latter Day Saints. Despite being nearly eighty years old – it was revised and reissued in 1971 – and the subject of controversy in the Mormon church, this is a brilliant work of biography. Brodie writes extremely well and she knows the Mormon world and its belief system from within.

Her sin – if you can call it that – was to treat Joseph Smith as a mortal, historical figure. Unless you believe that the Angel Moroni really revealed a set of golden tablets to Joseph Smith that contained a set of divine truths and the amazing story he tells… show more.

Going Clear is the best account of the bizarre phenomenon that is Scientology.

Thoroughly reported, researched, and written, Wright works hard to be fair to L. Ron Hubbard and the movement he spawned – he always refers to it as a church – and yet the accumulation of facts reveals Hubbard to be a pathological liar, a sociopath, and a brilliant, visionary huckster. Wright also details the brutal tactics that Scientology adopted to win itself tax-exempt status as a church and to discourage and punish those who dissent or defect, labelled “suppressive persons” by the group.

Wright uses the term “prison of belief” in his subtitle which reflects his interest in the way that cult-like group create closed systems of belief, which, however outlandish they may seem to outsiders, are internally consistent and all-encompassing.

For a theoretical and psychological understanding of the workings of cults, I would strongly recommend the work of Robert Jay Lifton, in particular, his most recent book Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealoutry, which brings together many of his writings over the years on the subject of cults and what he called “totalizing” groups, ones which demand absolute commitment.

Lifton, who wrote about “Nazi Doctors," the Chinese cultural revolution, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, which carried out a deadly sarin attack on a Tokyo subway in 1987, grasped that the mechanism of belief and allegiance that bind both political and religious movements are essentially the same.

Lifton worked out eight criteria for thought control that groups commonly used that went from “Milieu Control,” (isolating members and control the information they are exposed to) and “Demand for Purity” (in which the good… show more.

The “perfectionist” community at Oneida, NY was, perhaps, the closest analogue to the polygamous group I wrote about in my book.

In reaction to the strict Calvinist faith of his Puritan forefathers, with their deep conviction in original sin, John Humphrey Noyes believed that it was possible to be without sin in this world.

He believed that in heaven people would be paired with their true “spiritual” wife or husband, different from the imperfect matches that people made on earth. This evolved in Noyes’ idea of “complex marriage,” in which everyone in his community was free to have sex with anyone else, in order to get beyond the jealous, possessive, and exclusive nature of traditional marriage.

In 1848, Noyes founded his own community in Oneida, which eventually grew to include about 300 people before it fell apart in 1879. In order to avoid a plethora of children, Noyes preached the… show more.

Layton escaped, at great risk, to try to prevent the tragedy of Jonestown. Her book is the best book yet to read to see Jonestown and Jim Jones through the eyes of a survivor. Layton entered Jonestown (as did most of Ron’s and my students) later than early settlers, when the situation was getting more and more dire as Jones was deteriorating. 

Twenty-four at the time, Layton accompanied her mother, who believed Jones could cure her cancer. As Charles Krause says in the foreword, “Debbie quickly realized that she and the others had been deliberately deceived: Jonestown was essentially a concentration camp in the jungle.” Layton had been in the church since she was a teen. Jones had immediately recognized her intelligence and energy, and eventually made her one of his inner circle. When she left, he declared her a traitor. The book is fascinating and well written.

Julia Scheeres is the New York Times best-selling author of Jesus Land, a memoir about being sent, along with her adoptive brother, to a Christian reform camp in the Dominican Republic Their parents, conservative Christians sent them there when Julia and her brother were teenagers. The camp, Scheeres says, had “some uncanny parallels” with Jonestown. 

She begins the story with the story of Tommy Bogue’s “adventure.” Tommy “gripped the slick railing, bracing himself against the waves,” as Jonestown’s small boat headed across the Atlantic and up the coast to the Kaituma River, on his journey to the settlement. Tommy, like Layton, was soon disillusioned. Tommy was a brother of Marilee, Ron’s and my student, who like her mother, was a Jones loyalist. Tommy refused to follow the many strict rules in Jonestown, and broke them to go outside of its borders to follow his curiosity about the jungle and the… show more.

Raven is the best, most comprehensive, and most thoroughly researched book on Jim Jones, Jonestown, and Peoples Temple. Reiterman is a fine investigative journalist who was part of a group to visit Jonestown, Guyana in November of 1978. The visitors included, among others, eight members of the press; Congressman Leo Ryan and his aide Jackie Speier; and thirteen representatives of the “Concerned Relatives,” their own name for the group. Every member of the group had defected from the Temple in San Francisco. Only some of these visitors—Reiterman and a few of the other journalists, Ryan and Speier, and a small number of the group of relatives—were finally and reluctantly admitted in by Jones, on the stern advice of Jones’s lawyers. The Concerned Relatives were there to see if—as they strongly suspected—those in Jonestown were being held against their will.  The journalists wanted to find the truth about life in the… show more.

This novel reimagines the events of the Jonestown massacre with lushly beautiful prose and a magical realist twist that offers the possibility of escape and redemption from the most horrific circumstances.

It’s a wonderfully immersive story that sucks you in with sensory detail and a hope-against-hope that the main characters won’t “drink the Kool-Aid”. One of those books where you need to sit still and catch your breath after turning the last page…

As someone who personally knows this author, I can say with absolute certainty that this is one of the best go-to books for anyone interested in cult structure and the dynamics of cult involvement. If you’ve ever been perplexed by how someone could possibly get involved in not just a religion-based cult, but also a politics-based cult, then this is the volume for you. It’s intriguing, as well as informative.  

Woollett’s novel is based on much research on Peoples Temple and Jonestown. She came to the US from Australia for interviews with many survivors and others—including Ron Cabral and me because of our knowledge of the teenagers in the Temple. It’s a great read and adds much to the understanding of those who joined the Temple. Evelyn Lyndon (all the characters have fictional names except Jim Jones) is the “Beautiful Revolutionary” who, with her idealistic husband, joins the Temple and eventually becomes one of Jones’s mistresses. I recognize many of the book’s characters, sometimes two people rolled into one. Only in a novel could Woollett be in the minds of the characters she follows in this story, who are all believable and vividly drawn.