Cult City; In Byron's Wake

I've been fascinated (and horrified) by Jim Jones and Jonestown ever since I read Jeff Guinn's book, "Road to Jonestown".  I also saw the Sundance documentary in December, and oh my God, it was disturbing. It's one thing to read about thousands of dead bodies, it's quite another to see footage of them.
At any rate, "Cult City" was about how San Francisco's mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were both caught up in Jones's wake of destruction. Milk fell for Jones's hook, line, and sinker (as did so many others). I enjoyed how Flynn laid the story out, alternating between Milk and Jones, showing how they intertwined. I didn't know much about Harvey Milk before this, but he sounds like a complicated and conflicted person.

I was surprised at how many people put this book on hold at my library after I ordered it. I thought I was the only one who would want to read about Lord Byron. I guess I was wrong! Byron was really a despicable man, he had an affair with his half-sister and had a child with her, he married Annabella Milbanke and they had a daughter, Augusta Ada (strangely enough, "Augusta" was also his half-sister's name) and Annabella left Byron just a few weeks afterwards, causing quite the scandal. Byron played the depressed, maligned husband while Annabella kept quiet as to what drove her away after just a year of marriage. Byron went on to have an affair with Mary Shelley's step-sister that produced another illegitimate child, one that he forcibly took away from her mother and put in a convent because (irony alert) he argued that her mother was immoral because she got pregnant out of wedlock. Yeah, okay, Byron. He died young and honestly, I had to stop myself from cheering. His wife led a quiet, scandal free life the rest of her days, and her daughter, Ada, grew up to become a math prodigy. It was interesting, but a very slow, tedious read.