it is so easy now for people to denounce john fick comes as cold this and baby killers and even susan jacoby who is a respected cultural historian recently called him in her book the psychotic kool-aid drinkers of jones town. well, i hope this book challenges this notion similarly set the record straight about how trapped people were jonestown and how isolated and there is no way out. and that's what i found in these documents. i found it heartbreaking letters from dozens of letters from people to jim jones saying i want to go home. i had no idea it was like this. please. my children are scared. just let me go home. he would let anybody leave. an essential argument may both in what i discovered in my research is that he was planning to kill his followers for years before he brought them to jonestown. he taught that loading them into buses and driving the buses off the court and it ridge. he talked about loading them onto an airplane crashing into the ocean. and of course, the rank-and-file members have no idea that the secret conversations were going on. it was his inner circle who tended to

ferguson's this is the star power and decline of several western empires with author and culture critic susan jacoby. >> well, as it happens i have been rereading the fall of the roman empire at the same time have been reading your book. .. >> host: do you see what'shappe? by that i mean the whole toxic boss of news that is brought your lives everyday in western europe, the united states. united states. do you see this is relatively sudden, or as the result of factors that go back at least as far as the second world war? >> guest: far be it from me to disagree with edward gibbon, probably the greatest historian of all time. but one of the points i wanted to make in "civilization" was gibbon is one of those historians who had encouraged us to think of historical processes as quite gradual and slow acting. he covers about them in history. brohm seems to take his thousand years or so in decline a fall. i've suppose the problem with that approach a circle change is it encourages a certain complacency in us, a sense that while we have problems but they will probably play out over the decades and possibly