Maxim Kulikov Kulikov من عند 36966 Areas, Pontevedra, إسبانيا من عند 36966 Areas, Pontevedra, إسبانيا

enjoyed it a lot. couldn't wait until the next book.

Beautiful, impressionistic, and painful. I know this sounds sarcastic, but I love when there are two clear choices for a narrative focus and the author picks what appears to be the more boring of the two options. We follow the sister least destined for chaos through a sad sort of life. There's no way to read the last 20 or so pages of this short book without feeling scraped raw and really, really fragile about growing up in any way, at any time.

I got to this book from Jon Krakauer's amazing Under the Banner of Heaven because I needed to know more about the history of the Mormon Church and Smith himself. Brodie was a well-regarded academic historian and, I gather, an ex-Mormon by the time she wrote this. First and foremost, this is a great story, whether you think Smith is a complete and utter fraud or a prophet, or something in between. Brodie is a skeptic and pulls no punches, which I like, but I found the book weakest where the most important questions arise: how does somebody convince others and then himself that he's a prophet of God, and of the literally unbelievable tale he spun about the plates, the stones, and all the rest? Brodie's various hypotheses (e.g. Smith, perhaps unknowingly, had hypnotic powers) aren't persuasive. Still, this is a strong book on a great topic, almost a page turner, and it's led me to want to know more. So now I'm reading a much more favorable Smith bio, Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling. The comparison is interesting--for example, Brodie makes much of Smith's early work digging for ancient treasure on farms in New York; Bushman pushes this aside.