Our Father Who Art in Hell

About the Book

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

About the Author

James Reston, Jr. is the author of eleven acclaimed books. The publication of Our Father Who Art in Hell led to a 90 minute NPR radio special called "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown," which won the Prix Italia in 1982 and to a play, "Jonestown Express," which premiered in Providence, Rhode Island in 1984.