Review: Reiterman, Raven (1982)

Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People by Tim Reiterman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a massive biography of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. (Yes, "Peoples Temple" is correct. No apostrophe, no definite article.) Reiterman was one of the reporters who went with Congressman Leo Ryan to visit Jonestown, which was the precipitating incident for the mass murder-suicide that, tragically, made Jonestown famous. So Reiterman actually MET Jim Jones and was nearly killed by his followers, which gives the biography a certain authority.

Reiterman has also done his homework through interviews and FOIA and digging in newspaper archives, so really presents the best and most rounded picture possible of a secretive paranoid megalomaniac.

I find Jim Jones fascinating in a trainwreck sort of way, because his ideals seem to have been genuine---he DID work for racial equality, although PT itself reinscribed the same old racial hierarchy, and he did passionately believe in socialism (which for me counts in the plus column when it's practical boots on the ground everybody-has-enough-food-and-a-place-to-sleep socialism)---and yet he is one of the most evil people of the 20th century. He twisted everything he touched---and was doing so basically from the beginning of his career as a preacher---until it turned into the horrifically egalitarian massacre at Jonestown. The people who committed the murders followed through and killed themselves. SOMEONE killed Jim Jones, which Reiterman speculates was not his actual plan. Jones talked about mass suicide a lot before he made it happen, and he always said that someone had to stay alive to explain, and who better than Jones himself? And there are some weird things about what he did at the end---sending a couple of guys off with briefcases full of money and guns, his murderous goons leaving the Cessna untouched although they shot out one of the engines of the larger plane (Jones had at least one person in his inner circle who could fly a Cessna), and although Jones died of a contact gunshot wound to the temple, the gun was found twenty feet away from his body, as if someone else made sure he carried through with the master plan.

That's one of the many unknowable things about Jonestown, including exactly how many people died and who they were. The US government and the legal system did a terrible job with the aftermath: "The authors had intended to include a complete list of the Jonestown dead but discovered that no such roster had been compiled. A list supplied by the court-appointed Peoples Temple receiver in February 1982 contained only 883 names---those 660 people whose bodies were positively identified and 223 who were presumed to have died at Jonestown. Receiver Robert Fabian said there was no way to account for the other 30 bodies found at Jonestown but suggested that many were children who had been born there. The authors decided against using the list, however, because it contained many omissions, some inaccurate entries, and other errors in the case of adult membership" (592).

The massacre at Jonestown is horrific and tragic all on its own, but it's also a sad fact that it eclipses the good that Peoples Temple did. The evil in Jim Jones ultimately overwhelmed the good.

This is a good, solidly written biography. Reiterman does his best to explain the unexplainable.



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