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3,640 words · no email, no account
No. 057 · Crime · Crime
The Nine Hundred and Eighteen
a biography of Jim Warren Jones (Peoples Temple)
What the book is
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.
At a glance
- Subject
- Jim Warren Jones (Peoples Temple)
- Shelf
- Crime · Crime
- Written by
- Frederick Saxby
- Chapters
- 18 across 190 pages
- Narrated by
- Theo Brackett
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- mass suicide · cult abuse · child death
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01LynnRead free
- 02The Charisma3,342 words
- 03The Peoples Temple3,248 words
- 04The Integrated Congregation3,174 words
- 05The Machine3,260 words
- 06California3,735 words
- 07The Move to Guyana3,194 words
- 08The Commune2,863 words
- 09The Concerned Relatives3,713 words
- 10November 172,876 words
- 11The Airstrip3,121 words
- 12November 182,977 words
- 13The Dead3,109 words
- 14The Myth3,508 words
- 15The Tapes3,457 words
- 16The Investigation3,381 words
- 17The Survivors3,274 words
- 18The 9183,726 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- 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
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who 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.
02Is 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.
03Can 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.
04How long is it?
About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 190 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
06Does 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
This book deals with
- mass suicide
- cult abuse
- child death
Listed before you buy, not after.
