“Riveting…unforgettable…heart-breaking…bone-chilling. You will not be able to look away.” —The San Francisco Chronicle

“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

“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.” — The San Francisco Sunday Chronicle Book Review

“Gripping.” — The Globe and Mail

“Meticulously researched, and written with clear-eyed, sensitive perspective.” — The San Francisco Bay Guardian

“A gripping account of how people can be taken in by a charismatic and crazed tyrant.” —The New York Times, Editors’ Choice

“Haunting… and tempered with enormous sympathy.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Notably levelheaded in a field where sensationalism, conspiracy theories and bizarre reasoning run free.” — Salon.com, Editors’ Choice

“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

“Scheeres shows great compassion and journalistic skill in reconstructing Jonestown's last months and the lives
of many Temple members…a well-written, disturbing tale of faith and evil.” —Kirkus

"The first solid history of the Temple...less a warning about
the dangers of religosity than a clear headed chronology." —San Francisco magazine

"Julia Scheeres' A Thousand Lives... tells the tragic tale of Jonestown -- in its way,
a peculiarly American apocalypse." —L.A. Times

"It's hard to imagine how people might be so browbeaten, afraid and misled that they would bring about their own deaths — but Scheeres has made that terrifying story believable and human." —The Miami Herald

"This is a more personal account than we have had before of religious feelings channeled into self-destruction… (a) full and balanced portrait." —The Columbus Post Dispatch

"Scheeres’s account of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown, founded on new and overlooked FBI records, brings clarity…no other writer has chronicled so forcefully how much help Jones had in engineering death." —Maclean’s