BookBrowse Reviews Death in the Jungle by Candace Fleming

BookBrowse:

Death in the Jungle uses historical documents and interviews to tell the story of Jim Jones, the preacher-turned-cult-leader who orchestrated the death of more than nine hundred followers at his Jonestown settlement.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

Most people have heard the expression "drinking the Kool-Aid," but not everyone is familiar with its horrifying origin. The often offhanded phrase is a reference to the 1978 tragedy at Jonestown, a social community in the jungle of South America where one man coerced almost one thousand individuals into mass suicide by drinking a mixture of cyanide and an off-brand Kool-Aid. In her latest book, Death in the Jungle, Candace Fleming explores the life of Jim Jones, the infamous preacher-turned-cult-leader who indoctrinated thousands of followers and instigated one of the worst mass murders in American history.

Fleming begins her book with a list of key people involved, a guidepost that becomes increasingly helpful as she explains the way that Jones pushed his followers into communal living and began to rearrange families. Jones was an incredibly charismatic individual, using shrewd observations and playing into social movements to manipulate others to fit his goals. As a young child, he had seen the power a preacher held over his congregation and decided he "wanted to be just like that preacher. Respected. Admired. The center of attention." Jones began his church, called Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church, in 1954, and within a few years he had convinced two different mothers to put their children up for adoption so that Jones, a white man married to a white woman, could bring them into what he called his "rainbow family"—a family with multiple children of different races that Jones said would be "a living example of racial harmony." Jones also convinced one husband who was new to the Temple to divorce his wife so that Jones could have an affair with her. Similar rearrangements of married couples occurred throughout the Temple according to Jones' desires and his need for control.

In the grisly aftermath of Jonestown, many people scoffed at Jones' victims, who had fallen for such an obvious, in retrospect, creep and liar. But Fleming's interviews with Jones' followers and survivors make it clear why so many people believed in him. It was partly because of his charisma (his son recalled that Jones had something in him that could "just light people up"), but also because of the tangible good he was doing, especially for the Black community. In the early years of his church, Jones set himself up in racially segregated areas and mobilized his whiteness on behalf of Black members, like helping one elderly Black woman write a letter to the electric company to fix her service, which got it fixed immediately after months of the woman being ignored. He attracted members by upholding promises to help people in the present, rather than providing platitudes to "endure the here and now" until they could get to the Promised Land, by running halfway homes and soup kitchens, caring for children, taking in stray animals, and more. Jonestown survivor Hyacinth Thrash said that Jones at this time was "so good…he'd give a man the shoes off his own feet."

His followers did not suspect his personal motivations for these good works, but his motives were questionable at best, Fleming writes—eventually, Jones lost faith in God and was envisioning a socialist congregation with himself as the leader, and there's no telling if he truly believed in these causes or if he merely saw his good deeds as a way to convert and manipulate people. Either way, by the mid-1960s, Jones had begun declaring himself a prophet and using fear tactics such as fake assassination attempts, false visions of nuclear war, and commitment tests involving "poisoned" wine to manipulate Temple members. Yet "few members objected to this new level of control…they believed Jones…knew what was best for them."

What makes Death in the Jungle particularly interesting are the perspectives of members who did not believe, either immediately or eventually, that Jones knew what was best for them. In 1973, a group of younger members grew disillusioned with Jones, his rhetoric, and his creepy control over his followers' sex lives. In a letter to Jones, they wrote that "for the past 6 years all staff have concerned themselves with have been the castrating of people, calling them homosexual, sex, sex, sex. What about Socialism?" They also called out the disconnect between Jones' preaching on racial equity and his advancement of only white members within the Temple. One of Jones' adopted daughters and her husband also chose to flee; the husband, Mike, said that he "couldn't justify [his actions] anymore…the beatings…the lying…[he] hated himself for going along with it."

Others had their misgivings about Jones but didn't decide to leave the Temple until they were already at Jonestown. Fleming writes that Jonestown was purportedly meant to be a "socialist utopia in the wilderness far from established society," where members could create a self-sustaining community. But when Jones arrived, after other members had begun setting up the community, he dropped all pretenses of religion and forced the members into grueling work schedules and punishing conditions; far from civilization, the members' full devotion to Jones was their only option for survival.

On that fateful final day, Jones orchestrated the assassination of a congressman who had to come to investigate reports of abuse and human rights violations, then told his followers that Jonestown was about to be invaded by the US army and that they needed to kill themselves as a form of "revolutionary suicide" to avoid being killed or taken back to America. "They won't let us alone…and there's no way, no way we can survive," he told them.

Thrash, who was planning to defect and refused to join the others when Jones beckoned them, survived Jonestown but was distraught over the loss of her sister, her friends, and the settlement's children: "it's enough to make you scream your lungs out," she said. One survivor who lost four children at Jonestown said of the expression "drinking the Kool-Aid" that she "hated that people laughed when they said it, like what happened was somehow funny." Fleming's unflinching look at Jim Jones, his followers, and the few that survived to share their stories of Jonestown is both horrifying and heartbreaking, and although targeted at a young adult audience, readers of all ages with an interest in true crime or psychology will find Death in the Jungle unputdownable.

This review first ran in the May 21, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.