Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown

How did Jim Jones, the leader of Peoples Temple, convince more than 900 of his followers to commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced punch?

Using riveting first-person accounts, award-winning author Candace Fleming reveals the makings of a cult leader...from Jones’s humble origins as a child of the Depression… to his founding of a group whose idealistic promises of equality and justice attracted thousands of followers… to his relocation of Temple headquarters from California to an unsettled territory in Guyana, South America, which he dubbed "Jonestown”… to his transformation of Peoples Temple into a nefarious experiment in mind-control.

And Fleming relates Jones’s final act, persuading his followers to swallow fatal doses of cyanide—to “drink the kool-aid,” as it became known—as a test of their ultimate devotion.

Here is a sweeping story that traces, step by step, the ways in which one man slowly indoctrinated, then murdered, 900 innocent, well- meaning people. And how a few members, Jones' own son included, stood up to him... but not before it was too late.