Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy
About this book
Rarely does a book come along which so transcends its apparent subject that the reader is ultimately given something larger, richer, and more revealing than he might initially have imagined. Already published in England to overwhelming acclaim, Shiva Naipaul's Journey to Nowhere is such a book – a “powerful, lucid, and beautifully written book” (The Spectator) that is destined to be one of the most controversial works of 1981.In it, this major writer takes us beyond the events and surface details surrounding the tragedy of Jonestown and the People's Temple – and gives us his remarkable, unique perspective on the deadly drama of ideas, environments, and unholy alliances that shaped those events both in Guyana and, even more significantly, in America.Journey to Nowhere is, on one level, a “brilliantly edgy safari” (New Statesman) inside the Third World itself – a place of increasing importance in our lives – and on another, a book about America, about the corrupt and corrupting ideologies and chi-chi politics of the past twenty years that enabled the Reverend Jim Jones and the Temple to flourish and grow powerful in California and Guyana,Drawing on interviews – with former members of the Temple, various officials, and such people as Buckminster Fuller, Huey Newton, Clark Kerr, and others – on documents, and most importantly, on his own strong, clear reactions on what he observed, Naipaul examines the Guyana of Forbes Burnham, the CIA stooge turned Third World socialist leader, whose stated ideals of socialism, racial brotherhood, and cooperative agricultural enterprise coincided so neatly, we learn for the first time, with those of the People's Temple – ideals that led all too easily to violence and death. “In life,” Naipaul writes, “they had been hailed by the Guyanese government as socialist heroes; in death, they had become hopelessly American.”In California, he traces the ideas generated in the 1960s in the white radical and Black Power movements – and the evolution of those ideas in the 1970s into the preoccupation with “self-realization,” ecology, and “life-style.” We learn of the Temple's formation and of its respected place in the San Francisco community; of Jim Jones and his life, from his small-town Indiana background to his coming West; of the Concerned Relatives and their attempts to totally discredit the Temple and extricate their family members from it. But above all, Naipaul relentlessly explores the American society that produced and nurtured Jones and his followers: the politicians and social workers, the Zen Buddhists and the poor – the junk people whom America professes to care about, but prefers to forget.Absolutely convincing, timely in its message, and written with “the sardonic humor which has become his trademark” (The Times), Journey to Nowhere is “a brilliant achievement” (The Sunday Times). It is certain to be talked about – and argued about – for years to come.