James Jr. Reston Knihy

This is the definitive work on the Guyana tragedy when on November 18, 1978, one thousand members of the People’s Temple cult killed themselves in a Guyana jungle by drinking poison-laced Kool-Aid. Through the Freedom of Information Act, the author obtained more than 800 hours of tape recordings made in the jungle. Reston chronicles the descent into madness of the cult leader, the Reverend Jim Jones. "Reston's eye is novelistic....His larger purpose is to make the terribly irrational somehow understandable....He does so with the good judgment of a writer willing to avoid certain faddish modes of analysis." —Robert Coles, Washington Post Book Review

The dramatic story of an era during which science and religion were one and where one man dared to defy the only power on earth that was able to bring him to his knees.

“The book describes Reston’s journey through the south retracing General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March from Atlanta to the Sea and then north into North Carolina. Reston considers southern mythology about Sherman and the Civil War, and compares it to accurate history. In Part II he makes parallels between Sherman’s method of warfare and the methods of the Vietnam War.” —The New Yorker "Original, provocative and far ranging...deserves a wide audience." —Los Angeles Times "A fine meditation on American history, absorbing in its narrative and compelling in its challenge to the national conscience." —Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "We are obliged to Reston for his reflections on this historical analogy; not so much for setting our minds at rest about moral dilemmas of the present as for lending them needed perspective." —C. Vann Woodward, Boston Globe

This Book-of-the-Month Club featured alternate portrayals the celebrated case of Joan Little, the young black woman who stabbed a white jailer-rapist and then was tried for capital murder in North Carolina. The case was an international sensation, involving a womans right to kill a potential rapist, civil rights, prisoners rights, and capitol punishment.