Back to the World:A Life after Jonestown

by: Eugene Smith (author) (Author)

Publisher: Texas Christian University Press

Publication Date: 30 April 2021

Language: English

Print Length: 200 pages

ISBN-10: 0875657788

ISBN-13: 9780875657783

Book Description

Eugene Smith lost his mother, wife, and infant son in the mass murder-suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. Repatriated by the US authorities on New Year's Eve, he broke a $50 bill stashed in his shoe to buy breakfast for himself and a fellow survivor. Retuing to Califoia at age twenty-one, Smith faced the daunting challenge of building from scratch a meaningful and self-sufficient life in the American society he thought he had left behind. 'My first responsibility as a survivor,' he writes, 'was not to embarrass my mother or my wife or my child, and to set an example that can't be questioned.'Back to the World:A Life after Jonestown is the story of a double survival:first of the destruction of the idealistic but tragically flawed Peoples Temple community, then of its aftermath.Having survived, Smith has hard questions for today's America. 'It's irritating to me that, four decades later, like a broken record, we're going through all this all over again,' he writes.
Eugene Smith lost his mother, wife, and infant son in the mass murder-suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. Repatriated by the US authorities on New Year's Eve, he broke a $50 bill stashed in his shoe to buy breakfast for himself and a fellow survivor. Retuing to Califoia at age twenty-one, Smith faced the daunting challenge of building from scratch a meaningful and self-sufficient life in the American society he thought he had left behind. 'My first responsibility as a survivor,' he writes, 'was not to embarrass my mother or my wife or my child, and to set an example that can't be questioned.'Back to the World:A Life after Jonestown is the story of a double survival:first of the destruction of the idealistic but tragically flawed Peoples Temple community, then of its aftermath.Having survived, Smith has hard questions for today's America. 'It's irritating to me that, four decades later, like a broken record, we're going through all this all over again,' he writes.