Mini Reviews: Salvation On Sand Mountain || The Road To Jonestown

Salvation On Sand Mountain: Snake Handling And Redemption In Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington

Genre: Nonfiction

Pages: 256

Publication date: January 1995

The people of Southern Appalachia are hill people of Scottish-Irish descent—religious mystics who cast out demons, drink strychnine, and handle rattlesnakes. When the author, himself Scottish-Irish, uncovers records of snake-handling Covingtons, he decides to take up serpents.

Likes: I don't know much about Christianity, but I think if God wanted us to touch rattlesnakes, he wouldn’t have put rattles on them. That sound means not to touch them.

Anyway, the author is a journalist who spent two years as a member of a snake-handling church in southern Appalachia. His interest in snake handling starts with a work assignment and curiosity about his family heritage. It quickly develops into an obsession that kind of freaks him out. He isn’t afraid to examine his own life. Holding rattlesnakes and drinking poison are odd activities to want to do. In this book, the author delves into the history of snake handling and looks at his own thrill-seeking behavior to discover why people take up serpents.

I appreciate the author’s honesty. He shows how difficult it can be for a journalist to write about personal subjects in an objective way. He goes to the church as a journalist in search of a good story, but the service speaks to him as a danger-loving Christian. For me, the most fascinating part of the book is watching the author struggle between being an observer and wanting to participate. I like that he admits to being a bad journalist. Good journalists don’t become personally involved with their subjects. Once he starts snake handling, it takes over his life. It becomes way more than just a story for a newspaper.

“There are moments when you stand on the brink of a new experience and understand that you have no choice about it. Either you walk into the experience or you turn away from it, but you know that no matter what you choose, you will have altered your life in a permanent way. Either way, there will be consequences.” – Salvation on Sand Mountain

Dislikes: This is a short book, but it feels long. There are quite a few scenes of men preaching while holding snakes. I appreciate knowing the religious reasons behind the snake obsession, but it gets repetitive quickly. I don’t think the author had enough material to fill a whole book. I was often tempted to skim the snake-handling scenes. I feel like I got the point after the first one.

Originally, the author attended this particular snake-handling church because one of the members had been arrested for attempted murder. He forced a snake to bite his wife (twice). The author planned to write about the attempted murder trial. That plan mostly gets derailed when the author joins the church. I wish more of the book had been about the crime and the people involved. That would have been more interesting than the repetitive snake/preaching scenes.

The Bottom Line: An informative look at Appalachian history and how journalists struggle to stay objective. I occasionally got bored.

The Road To Jonestown: Jim Jones And Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn

Genre: Nonfiction

Pages: 531

Publication date: April 2017

In the 1950s, a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially integrated, and he was a much-lauded leader in the contemporary civil rights movement. Eventually, Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to northern California. He became involved in electoral politics, and soon was a prominent Bay Area leader.

In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing to the fraught decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November 1978, when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink.

Likes: I’ve read a lot of Jonestown books in my life. I’m probably up to double digits by now. (Don’t ask why. I don’t have a satisfactory answer.) I can confidently say that this is the best Jonestown book I’ve ever read. It’s well-researched and exhaustingly thorough. If you want to know every tiny detail of Jim Jones’s life, read this book. It’s all in here.

I love that the author doesn’t give his opinion on everything. Unlike a lot of nonfiction writers, he keeps himself out of the story. He presents the facts, interviews people who knew Jones, and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. I appreciate that.

Jim Jones is endlessly fascinating to me because he could have changed the world in positive ways. Before he moved to the jungle and murdered 900 people, he was doing nice stuff! He was a successful reverend who knew how to get jobs for the poor, desegregate communities, and fight injustice. He didn’t just preach about helping people. He actually did the work. Unfortunately, he was also a delusional psychopath with ego problems and a painkiller addiction. That rarely ends well.

“Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts. The purpose of Peoples Temple was to offer such a compelling example of living in racial and economic equality that everyone else would be won over and want to live the same way.” – The Road To Jonestown

Dislikes: I appreciate the meticulousness of the research, but I occasionally wished that the author would get to the point a little quicker. This book is dense. I could only read it in small doses because I’d start to feel my brain going numb and my eyes glazing over. There is a lot of information to absorb.

The Bottom Line: My new favorite Jonestown book. The author also wrote a book about Charles Manson that I’ll be reading ASAP.