Text concerns, the murder of a U.S. congressman, and the subsequent mass suicides known as the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, 1978. " ..Shiva Naipaul's interest in the story lies not so much in the events themselves as in the ideas and environments that shaped those events, the corrupt and corrupting ideologies that enabled Jim Jones and the People's Temple to flourish and grow powerful in California and in the Co-operative Republic of Guyana under its Comrade Leader Forbes Burnham" [from the dust jacket blurb].