# The Nine Hundred and Eighteen *A Biography of Jonestown* — Legendary Biographies No. 057 - **Subject:** Jim Warren Jones (Peoples Temple) - **Written by:** Frederick Saxby - **Shelf:** Crime / Crime - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 190 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 190 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 190 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-037-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Theo Brackett (ISBN 979-8-90623-018-8) - **Content notes:** mass suicide; cult abuse; child death Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/057-the-nine-hundred-and-eighteen.html ## About this book On the morning of November 18, 1978, a chartered plane idled on a jungle airstrip in northwestern Guyana while, a few miles away, a community of Americans queued in the heat to drink from a steel vat. By nightfall, nine hundred and eighteen people were dead — among them a United States congressman, an entire choir of children, and the preacher who had promised them a kingdom on earth. Frederick Saxby returns to Jonestown not as a cult, nor as a cautionary tale, but as a place — a settlement built by hand in the rainforest by men and women who had come there looking for something the country they left behind would not give them. Drawing on declassified FBI tapes, the surviving Peoples Temple archives, and decades of interviews with the few who walked out, Saxby reconstructs the colony month by month: the clinics and the rice fields, the loudspeakers and the public beatings, the long Wednesday nights when Jim Jones rehearsed the ending. The book moves between the pulpits of Indianapolis and the storefront temples of Fillmore Street, between civil-rights idealism and the slow architecture of coercion. It asks how a movement that began in the language of brotherhood ended in a clearing strewn with paper cups. What Saxby offers is not a verdict but a accounting — of the dead, named one by one, and of the country that produced them. ## Contents 1. Lynn 2. The Charisma 3. The Peoples Temple 4. The Integrated Congregation 5. The Machine 6. California 7. The Move to Guyana 8. The Commune 9. The Concerned Relatives 10. November 17 11. The Airstrip 12. November 18 13. The Dead 14. The Myth 15. The Tapes 16. The Investigation 17. The Survivors 18. The 918 ## Questions **Who is The Nine Hundred and Eighteen about?** Jim Warren Jones (Peoples Temple). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Nine Hundred and Eighteen — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,640 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 190 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: mass suicide; cult abuse; child death. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Frederick Saxby is a London-based military and intelligence historian who consulted for the BBC and Channel 4 before turning to book-length biography. He spent over a decade researching archival government papers and declassified logs, developing a deep knowledge of wartime operations. His writing focuses on the cryptographers, code-breakers, and quiet figures whose work shaped the twentieth century from inside locked rooms. His debut work, The Nine Hundred and Eighteen, reconstructs the daily lives and technical breakthroughs of a forgotten department of wartime intelligence operatives. Saxby relies on meticulous archival work and private diaries to reconstruct the human element behind complex strategic decisions. He lives in London, where he continues his archival research and spends his weekends walking along the Thames.