Joe

Ambitious synthesis of current apologetics which poses the challenge "From reason and communal ethics alone, is it wicked for postmodern Americans not to believe in God?"

A long, tiresome slog through the potatoes who are the effective protagonist of the book.

The first book in the series is the most human, which entices you forward into the other two books which feature demanding physics concepts as their main characters. Enjoy this book and buckle up to learn in the next two.

Snow Crash didn’t clock in with the interest and weight of Gibson’s Neuromancer (unfair, yes), but you can see the larval stages of Stephenson’s ability to take delight in humans in contest with each other.

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.

Why society is a whole cloth not frivolously mended