Jonestown and the Manson family

by Robert Endleman

Mass destruction of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas in April 1993 brought apocalyptic cults back into the news. This book is about the two most spectacularly destructive such cults of recent decades, Jim Jones's Peoples Temple culminating in the 900+ suicide-murders in Jonestown, and the mass-murdering "family" of Charles Manson. These two were remarkably similar. In each cult the male leader was obsessed with sex and exercised sexual domination over the members of the community. In each, the leader had complex delusions and fantasies about race. Each leader also exerted mesmerizing, totalitarian control over his followers, so that they succumbed to a kind of collective madness and committed mass suicide in one case and irrational murders in the other. This book traces the development of each of these movements, their parallels, and the pervasive themes of race, sexuality, and collective madness in each of them.