Palladino spent seven years investigating the Peoples Temple tragedy, in which more than 900 members of a religious cult died in Guyana in 1979.
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Palladino is best known for his work in the Peoples Temple tragedy, his defense of car maker John DeLorean, and for the Bill Clinton presidential election committee, the tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, singer Courtney Love, and musician R. Kelly.
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Groups including the Branch Davidians, Church Universal and Triumphant, the Church of Satan, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, the Peoples Temple, Heaven's Gate, and the Unification Church are discussed in the book.
The church Grey designed for the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Los Angeles was later used by Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple immediately prior to the 1978 Jonestown tragedy.
It was founded in 1898 as a Theosophical intentional community and is the home and headquarters of a religious organization, The Temple of the People (not to be confused with Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple).
Groups, movements and individuals discussed in the book include UFO religions, Scientology, the New Age movement, Aum Shinrikyo, Meher Baba, Sufism, Children of God, Divine Light Mission, Deepak Chopra, Aleister Crowley, Werner Erhard, Erhard Seminars Training, and Landmark Forum, Falun Gong, Hare Krishna, Heaven's Gate, Peoples Temple, and many other groups.
A number of prominent persons were killed or committed suicide using potassium cyanide, including members of the Young Bosnia and members of the Nazi Party, such as Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, World War II era British agents (using purpose-made suicide pills), computer scientist Alan Turing, and various religious cult suicides such as by the Peoples Temple and Heaven's Gate.
One of the more dubious distinctions awarded Redwood Valley is it being the home of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple cult for a short time.
Dr. Anthony Storr Professor of Psychiatry, Fellow at the Royal College of Physicians, and Emeritus Fellow at Green College at Oxford, and a former Clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry at Oxford University wrote: "Deborah Layton vividly describes her initial intense involvement with Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple and her eventual risky escape from a promised utopia which had turned into a concentration camp. This book is both gripping and revealing."