This is not a great book. The biggest surprise to me was the extent to which Jim Jones revealed his insanity and depravity long before he took his whole kit-and-caboodle to Guyana. What makes people ignore all evidence and believe impossible things? People let Jones split up their families, take their money, and abuse them, and still they stayed. They watched him fake healing and mistreat members. Very few left the temple. Why?? It's not so simple as a mere lack of education or sophistication. Many temple members were educated. There were nurses, teachers, a partially-trained doctor and some educators among the illiterate and elderly. I guess some people have their own reality distortion fields (see Steve Jobs) which enable them to discount any experience or belief that doesn't comport to their heart's desire---be it a divine Father building a Utopian socialist heaven on earth or the possibility of making an iPad. The last couple paragraphs of the book were a plea to the reader to try and understand that the majority of temple members were good people. But I have trouble with that concept. So many of them abandoned family and conventional morality to live with somebody else's husband or leave their own kids with others--so many watched their children beaten and tortured, watched their spouses be humiliated or sexually used and did nothing. I have a big problem respecting that.