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Raven
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Raven

The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People

About the Book

The basis for the upcoming HBO miniseries and the "definitive account of the Jonestown massacre" (Rolling Stone) -- now available for the first time in paperback.

Tim Reiterman’s Raven provides the seminal history of the Rev. Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and the murderous ordeal at Jonestown in 1978.

This PEN Award–winning work explores the ideals-gone-wrong, the intrigue, and the grim realities behind the Peoples Temple and its implosion in the jungle of South America. Reiterman’s reportage clarifies enduring misperceptions of the character and motives of Jim Jones, the reasons why people followed him, and the important truth that many of those who perished at Jonestown were victims of mass murder rather than suicide.

This widely sought work is restored to print after many years with a new preface by the author, as well as the more than sixty-five rare photographs from the original volume.

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Praise for Raven

“The definitive account of the Jonestown massacre; Reiterman was among a group of journalists, concerned relatives and congressional aides to accompany Congressman Leo Ryan on the ill-fated journey to Guyana to survey Jonestown.” –Rolling Stone
 
“The seminal book on the story of Jonestown.” –Associated Press
 
“Unquestionably emerges as the most valuable book on Jonestown to date…Every piece of the puzzle is here.”—David Evanier, National Review
 
“An extraordinary inquiry into the individual pathology of Jim Jones…To assemble this portrait obviously required staggering research. The writing is sensitive and lucid. The result is a document which will illumine a dark corner of our era.”—Daniel Schorr
 
“After reading Raven, there should be no more questions…A tour de force on the Rev. James Jones and the events that led his 900 disciples to drink poisoned punch on Nov. 18, 1978.” —Charlie Frush, The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“This stands as the definitive history …carefully compiled and completely horrifying.” —Marshall Kilduff, San Francisco Chronicle
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Excerpt

Raven

Preface

Three decades have passed since more than 900 Americans suffered horrible deaths in the jungle of the impoverished South American country of Guyana. The events in Jonestown on November 18, 1978, orchestrated by a charismatic preacher named Jim Jones and triggered by the slaying of a United States congressman on a nearby airstrip, have long ago moved from worldwide headlines to the pages of history. Yet fascination with the final days of Jonestown and the life of Jones has persisted over the years.

One of the most shocking and baffling events of the last century, the demise of Peoples Temple has been chronicled in books, movies, documentaries, plays, scholarly studies and countless television retrospectives. The images of an American tragedy on foreign soil -- poisoned punch squirted down the throats of infants, families locked in final embrace, mounds of bodies bloated in the tropical heat -- have endured in print, photos, video footage and memory.

Jonestown has come to symbolize unfathomable depravity, the outermost limits of what human beings can visit on each other and themselves, the ultimate power of a leader over his followers. Although complex and elusive, the reasons for the collapse of the Temple’s utopian dream into a hellish nightmare have been reduced again and again to a simplistic interpretation: a Svengali led his compliant, even robotic, flock to mass suicide. But Peoples Temple was more than a creation of one man’s vision. The Temple was a product of its time and the search for alternative religions and social relevance in the post-civil rights and post-Vietnam eras. Its story also speaks to the timeless yearnings of the human spirit for a sense of belonging, to be part of something larger than ourselves.

Above the wooden, throne-like chair from which Jones lorded over his people hung a sign that said: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’’ However, remembering the past is one thing, understanding it quite another. And this volume endeavors to do both, while piercing the many myths that have shrouded the truth about Jones, his followers, and the remote agricultural settlement that bore his name.

—Tim Reiterman
2008

About the Author

Tim Reiterman
Tim Reiterman has specialized in investigative projects as a reporter and editor for most of his more than 35 years in journalism. He was awarded his undergraduate degree and his Masters in journalism at UC Berkeley, where he began his reporting career covering the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s for major publications. While attending college, Reiterman began working for the Associated Press, where his coverage included the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the Hells Angels. He moved to the San Francisco Examiner where he investigated Jones and the Peoples Temple before covering Congressman Leo Ryan's trip to Guyana in 1978.

At Jonestown, Reiterman was wounded in the jungle airstrip attack that killed Rep. Ryan—the first congressman to die in the line of duty—plus three newsmen and a temple defector. He spent 18 months investigating abuses within the temple before the tragedy and years after it unraveling why and how it occurred.

After stints on the Examiner's investigative team and as city editor, Reiterman moved to the Los Angeles Times, where he led the investigative team and helped supervise Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. As state projects editor at the Los Angeles Times, work supervised by Reiterman was nominated for several Pulitzer Prizes, won top awards from Sigma Delta Chi and Investigative Reporters and Editors in 1997, and won the Associated Press's top sports enterprise award in 2000.

Over the years, Reiterman has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, the Larry King radio show and other national broadcasts. In the past two years, he was featured in a History Channel docudrama on the final days of Jonestown and an Oscar-nominated documentary on Jonestown for PBS/American Experience. A longtime writer and editor for the Los Angeles Times, Reiterman lives in San Francisco, where he is the Northern California news editor for the Associated Press. He has taught at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism for a decade.

His collaborator John Jacobs was a widely respected journalist who died in 2000.

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