Back to the World: A Life After Jonestown - Eugene Smith

nEugene 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. n Returning to California 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. nBack 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. n 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.n