Marked for Death

In the early 1970s, first-time author Stoen joined what he thought was a “utopian movement called Peoples Temple,” led by a charismatic leader named Jim Jones, and spent the next seven years as Jones’s personal attorney. Stoen’s deeply moving memoir traces his path from true believer to horrified spectator as Jones orchestrates the deaths—mostly through suicide—of 912 people in Jonestown, Guyana, an event that shocked the world in 1978. The Jones story has been told before, but Stoen’s role as an early participant in the growth of the Peoples Temple in northern California and San Francisco, as well as its move to its own community in Guyana, adds much to the story. Stoen admirably attempts to explain the “concern about economic inequality” that led many to embrace Jones, as well as the slow slide into manipulation and a desire for power in which Jones “turned himself over to Satan.” Stoen is also excellent in his description of the post-massacre media firestorm in which he was falsely accused of using his long fight to regain custody of his son to push Jones “over the edge,” as well as his successful struggle to overcome the guilt he felt over the experience and the tragic history of the Peoples Temple. (BookLife)