Reading A Thousand Lives

This weekend my review of Julia Scheeres’ A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception and Survival at Jonestown was published in The San Francisco Chronicle‘s book section. So far I’m reviewing books broadly related to religion, and specifically about those beliefs that most of us consider extreme and are therefore easy to sensationalize–Scientology and Jonestown.  Fortunately both Inside Scientology and A Thousand Lives work hard not to exoticize their subjects, taking the much more difficult stance of individualizing their characters and approaching them with sympathy.  Both books highly recommended!