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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
dark
informative
medium-paced
I’m morbidly fascinated w Mormon culture and history. This book was elegantly written and well researched.
challenging
emotional
reflective
tense
dark
informative
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
I’m not sure how to rate this book bc it was so well written and compelling but very much not for me. A lot of the content was insane and a bit triggering but then other parts were so slow and historically dense. I think if you like historical pieces and have carefully looked over the content warnings then it could be a better read. But definitely look into the themes in the book before reading it.
Couldn't put it down. A must read for anyone even slightly into true crime or curious about religion.
informative
slow-paced
dark
informative
medium-paced
Yes, it's a fascinating subject: 2 fundamentalist Mormon brothers feel called by God to slaughter their brother's wife and baby. What Krakauer writes is a deeply researched book that explores the roots of the Mormon faith and how the many fundamentalist offshoots occurred. What makes it quite good is that it would be easy to condemn all religion, or to demonize only fundamentalists. Either extreme would be wrong. Instead, Krakauer raises deeper questions about belief, about faith, about organized religion, and tries to draw a very difficult line between those that are destructive and those that are uplifting. I don't know that he succeeds, but the enjoyment is in exploring the possibility and ability to distinguish the two.
What is somewhat daunting about the book is its attempt to cover all the various fundmentalist sects and their bizarre and convoluted family trees. It was easy to get bogged down into the details of each sect, so toward the end, I found myself skipping pages that gave yet more history of yet another group. I think the book could have been shorter by probably 50 or 100 pages if it had used just one or two examples of fundamentalist sects, and had not given the complete history of the Mormon church, from inception to the present, including the political maneuverings of the men trying to wrest control from each other.
The underlying focus of the book was the history of the practice of polygamy, from Joseph Smith's first revelation, to its politically-expedient abandonment by the mainstream Mormon church, to it's embrace by the fundamentalist sects. Why this practice is so intriguing to people eludes me. I'm merely mystified why anyone thinks it's a good idea. So the continual focus of the book began to wear on me.
Probably the best written part of the book was the end that covered the incarceration, trial and sanity hearings of the brother. Krakauer's summary of the two sides of the case was brilliant. One one side we have the experts who testifed that delusional people are necessarily insane. Hearing a voice that commands you to kill is so far off the social scale that by its very nature it can't be sane. On the other hand, we have the experts who testified that being a religious follower and listening for God's voice isn't crazy - Presidents regularly claim they do this - and that apart from this heinous act, the brothers acted just like all the other fundamentalists.
What is somewhat daunting about the book is its attempt to cover all the various fundmentalist sects and their bizarre and convoluted family trees. It was easy to get bogged down into the details of each sect, so toward the end, I found myself skipping pages that gave yet more history of yet another group. I think the book could have been shorter by probably 50 or 100 pages if it had used just one or two examples of fundamentalist sects, and had not given the complete history of the Mormon church, from inception to the present, including the political maneuverings of the men trying to wrest control from each other.
The underlying focus of the book was the history of the practice of polygamy, from Joseph Smith's first revelation, to its politically-expedient abandonment by the mainstream Mormon church, to it's embrace by the fundamentalist sects. Why this practice is so intriguing to people eludes me. I'm merely mystified why anyone thinks it's a good idea. So the continual focus of the book began to wear on me.
Probably the best written part of the book was the end that covered the incarceration, trial and sanity hearings of the brother. Krakauer's summary of the two sides of the case was brilliant. One one side we have the experts who testifed that delusional people are necessarily insane. Hearing a voice that commands you to kill is so far off the social scale that by its very nature it can't be sane. On the other hand, we have the experts who testified that being a religious follower and listening for God's voice isn't crazy - Presidents regularly claim they do this - and that apart from this heinous act, the brothers acted just like all the other fundamentalists.