Volume 52, Number 18 · November 17, 2005
Angel in America
By Larry McMurtry
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
by Richard Lyman Bushman
Knopf, 740 pp., $35.00
OTHER BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ESSAY
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith
by Fawn M. Brodie
Vintage (second edition, revised and enlarged), 576 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
by Jon Krakauer
Doubleday, 372 pp., $26.00; $14.95 (paper)
Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism
by Richard L. Bushman
University of Illinois Press,272 pp., $29.95; $16.95 (paper)
Reconsidering No Man Knows My History: Fawn M. Brodie and Joseph Smith in Retrospect
edited by Newell G. Bringhurst
Utah State University Press, 192 pp., $19.95 (paper)
'I, Nephi...,' the first words of the Book of Mormon—to some twelve million members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, a holy book—reminds me of a similarly brisk summons to attention: 'Call me Ishmael,' the famous first words of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. In the Book of Mormon, the biblical Ishmael, son of Abraham, soon appears and helps the questing Nephi out of a spot of trouble with the locals—just the kind of trouble, with just the same kind of locals, that real Mormons, in the 1830s and 1840s, constantly found themselves in.
Review, 3276 words
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