Isangqa

When it comes to oil, American thinking might be summed up best by a “No More Blood for Oil” sticker on an SUV—which is to say, our ignorance is surpassed only by our arrogance. In this eye-opening travelogue, Lisa Margonelli, a former San Francisco contributor, maps the terrain between our comfortable existence at the top of the supply chain and the brutal realities on the ground. Bouncing from a Twin Peaks gas station to the oil fields of Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran, she advances a global notion of oil: it is politics, economics, a blessing, and, as the anarchy in the Niger Delta attests, a curse. Though prone to overkill (at one point, she jams five sets of statistics into three sentences), Margonelli excels at the telling description. A shrewd gas magnate has “pool player’s eyes”; American oil workers in destitute Chad look like “anxious ghosts.” It’s a sobering picture, and Margonelli’s attempts to salvage some hope from this bleak wreckage—she reports on China’s strides toward a sustainable future—sink like stones skipped into the ocean. In the final analysis, she writes, “there is no such thing as cheap gas.” It’s just a question of who pays, and how high the price.
CHRIS SMITH

The devil, as the saying goes, often comes in an attractive form. So it was with the reverend Jim Jones, the magnetic leader of San Francisco’s now-infamous Peoples Temple. In Jones­town, award-winning documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson charts the church’s transformation from utopian social justice movement to doomsday cult, as well as Jones’s own descent into insanity. We know how this story ends, of course—in a South American jungle in 1978, with the biggest mass suicide-murder in history—and the film propels us toward its conclusion with metronomic precision, giving the proceedings a sense of sickening inevitability. Through spooky, archival footage and interviews with temple members and a handful of survivors—whose raw pain, as they remember loved ones dying in their arms, is almost too hard to watch—Nelson masterfully connects the radical preacher’s flower-power teachings to the piles of bodies in Jones­town’s muddy town square. (One of the most fascinating characters is Jim Jones Jr., Jones’s black adopted son and the subject of a San Francisco profile in 2003.) What even Nelson can’t tell us, though, is why things went down as they did. As one temple member says, “We felt like we had gotten in so deep that there was actually no way out.” That’s the best answer we’re likely to get.
CHRIS SMITH

I didn’t hear many lukewarm assessments of Peskin over the course of my reporting: his supporters say he’s just what the city needs now; his enemies paint him as the second coming of Vladimir Lenin, a NIMBY warlord who has somehow seized control of the levers of power.