Julia Scheeres is the author of New York Times bestselling memoir Jesus Land. She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two daughters and is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2011
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2011
"A work of deep empathy for so many lives lost in the name of
different shades of hope." --L.A. Times
"A gripping account of how decent people can be taken in by a
charismatic and crazed tyrant." --New York Times Book Review
"Almost unbearably chilling... but tempered with enormous
sympathy." --Boston Globe
"Chilling and heart-wrenching, this is a brilliant testament to
Jones's victims, so many of whom were simply in the wrong place at
the wrong time." --Publisher's Weekly, starred review
"For those who can picture only the gory end of Jonestown, Julia
Scheeres offers a heartbreaking and often inspiring glimpse of what
might have been. Her masterfully told and exhaustively researched A
Thousand Lives should stand not only as the definitive word on
Jones' horrific machinations, but on the utopian dreams of a bygone
generation. A worthy follow-up to her superb memoir, Jesus Land."
--Tom Barbash, author of On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald,
Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal
"Gripping." --The Globe and Mail
"Her account is notably levelheaded in a field where
sensationalism, conspiracy theories and bizarre reasoning run
free." --Salon
"How do you tell a new story about Jim Jones and his followers,
when everyone knows how it ends? ...Julia Scheeres' riveting A
Thousand Lives gives us reason to look again. " --Miami Herald
"I thought I knew the story of Jonestown, but in reading A Thousand
Lives discovered that much of what I'd read and heard was pure
myth. Through meticulous research, beautiful writing and great
compassion, Scheeres presents an engrossing account of how Jim
Jones' followers--eager parishioners who yearned for a more
purposeful life and were willing to work for it--found themselves
trapped in a nightmare of unfathomable proportions. This book
serves as testimony to the seductiveness of religious fervor, and
how in the wrong hands it can be used to nefarious ends. It is also
a poignant and unforgettable tribute to those who lost their lives
and to those few who survived." -- Allison Hoover Bartlett, author
of the bestselling The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story
of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession
"It is important to get a story like this out there and remind the
public about it once in a while, so that history like this does not
repeat itself." --Gather.com
"Jonestown has become a grim metaphor for blind obedience--for
fanaticism without regard to consequences. In the aptly titled A
Thousand Lives, Julia Scheeres captures the humanity within this
terrible story, vividly depicting individuals trapped in a vortex
of hope and fear, faith and loss of faith, not to mention the
changes sweeping America in the 1960s and '70s. She makes their
journeys to that unfathomable tragedy all too real; what was truly
incredible, she shows, was the escape from death by a tiny handful
of survivors. Drawing on a mountain of sources compiled and
recently released by the FBI, she changes forever the way we think
about this dark chapter of our history." --T.J. Stiles, author of
the Pulitzer Prize-winning The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of
Cornelius Vanderbilt
"Julia Scheeres' A Thousand Lives... tells the tragic tale of
Jonestown -- in its way, a peculiarly American apocalypse." --L.A.
Times
"Julia Scheeres's book sheds startling new light on this murky,
mini-chapter of contemporary history....the narrative is [a]
compelling...psychological mystery." --The Wall Street Journal
"Riveting...You will not be able to look away. " --The San
Francisco Chronicle
"Scheeres shows great compassion and journalistic skill in
reconstructing Jonestown's last months and the lives of many Temple
members (including a few survivors)...[A Thousand Lives is a]
well-written, disturbing tale of faith and evil." --Kirkus
"The definitive book on Jonestown and the Danse Macabre of suicide
and murder orchestrated by mad Jim Jones. Julia Scheeres takes us
by the hand and leads us gently, inexorably, into the darkness."
-Tim Cahill, author of Lost in My Own Backyard
"The first solid history of the Temple...less a warning about the
dangers of religosity than a clear headed chronology." --San
Francisco magazine
"The revelations of [A Thousand Lives] shine through our everyday
relationships to war, our politics, our beliefs and our own
actions. This is a strikingly relevant book ." --San Francisco
Sunday Chronicle Book Review
"This the best book in a good long time on the dangers of fanatical
faith, the power of group belief and lure of deep certainties.
These demons that haunt the human mind can only be countered by
facing them with courage and honesty - this is precisely what
Scheeres has done." --Ethan Watters, author of Crazy Like Us
A New York Times Editor's Choice
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