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melodier93 's review for:
Under the Banner of Heaven
by Jon Krakauer
I really enjoyed this. Jon Krakauer is an excellent, immersive journalistic writer, and he weaves together the threads of this narrative with aplomb. It's difficult for me to say how my experience of the book would have been if I had read it before watching the new Hulu show starring Andrew Garfield - the show certainly helped me follow some of the major players, while also leaving me missing the human and mystery elements that the show does really well. Through no fault of Krakauer's own, the sections on Mormon history or the FLDS sects are sometimes difficult to follow because of the similar names, large families, and rampant incest. And at times the book is simply difficult to read because of the horrible exploitation and violence against women and girls that it frequently describes. My biggest issue with the book stems from its greatest strength: while intelligent and well-researched, this is not an academic book per se, and when Krakauer moves from reporting to philosophizing I found him occasionally eye-rolling and college-freshman-in-philosophy-101 in some of his generalizations. Over all, however, a really compelling book about the darkest chapters of Mormon history.