Joe

It is the magisterial biography, but so unkind to its reader.

Had no idea Armenian-Americans held such a rich response to tragedy. Staring into something hopeless and walking through it without lardering over it with boosterish “hope,” politics, or sentiment. More a sense of compulsory momentum, tragically persisted within.

The title story merits a second read after you’ve been startled. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8” felt contemporary for the meeting of disembodied voices and their eventual loss.

Fascinating as historiography. Tenured at BYU, the author (Ph.D, Univ of Wisconsin) evinces meticulously-footnoted skill at taking a secular “Mormon Studies” approach toward thematic threads of anti-Mormon reaction.

He describes the movement with studied evenhandedness until his chapter on its politics. At Nauvoo, Smith acts only defensively, and the catastrophe is triggered by internal dissent over the polygamy revelation. Generalizations warranting multiple citations in earlier chapters are simply claimed. Smith appears politically unagentic, the author omitting, for instance, mention of his candidacy for the U.S. presidency or his contested rhetoric in securing the settlement’s municipal charter from Illinois. The book is not an apologia or a hagiography of mormonism, but an academic contribution from a historian well aware of the world beyond it.

it is telling that its weakest portion lies in the failure to enter into critical reckoning with Smith himself and in the political claims he made as the singular voice of his religion.

Forget the head-pats from academia. Lord, would that I could write “popular” history like Tuchman. Her chapter on anarchism provided a toehold into its explosive desperation outside of accounts more commonly marked by fetishized violence or ideological dissection.

His graphic novels are stunning. His prose is meh.