Back to the World

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. 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." *Back to the World* 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.