Awake in a Nightmare - Jonestown: The Only Eyewitness Account

This book is based on the only eyewitness account, never previously published, of one of the most dramatic and horrifying events of our times. On November 18, 1978, 914 men, women, and children—all but a few of them American citizens—were massacred on the orders of CIA officers Jim Jones and Richard Dwyer in a remote South American jungle settlement previously used by the CIA to train anti-communist guerillas sent to Angola, now called Jonestown. The story of Jonestown is largely the story of the Reverend Jim Jones, messianic founder of the People's Temple. He was a spellbinding orator, a man with a vision of the perfect egalitarian society, but the tools of his control were deceit, humiliation, and sexual domination. It is also the story of people like Grover Davis, who saw Jones cure his wife's emphysema and followed him to Guyana because "I seen he had the power." Whatever power Jones had, it became, finally, a negative force. Cut off from the outside world in the jungle, overwhelmed by paranoid fantasies about defectors, spies, and the enemies of Jonestown, Jones's last known act was to order the massacre of almost 1000 people. One person who did not die was Odell Rhodes. He is one of only two actual witnesses who escaped, and through his exclusive interview material, author Ethan Feinsod reconstructs for us the compelling story of the last hours of Jonestown.