zackaboulazm

Mormonism is hot right now thanks to candidate Romney and I think that the flood of information on the topic that coincided with my reading this book has clouded my opinion of it a bit. Some of it, like a PBS documentary on Mormons, affirmed that the historical aspects of the book are accurate and well researched. Krakauer's experience is grounded in journalism and he did well linking his researched history to the roots of the fundamentalist off-shoots. Lacking, perhaps, is an account of the modern mainstream church, the LDS. That isn't his topic, but lack of information on it may create a skewed opinion of the LDS if someone was using this as a reference material for modern mainstream Mormon information. It is very much devoted to the fundamentalists, which are more interesting anyway. The story that he ties this history to is a gruesome one involving grisly murders driven by a family's fundamentalist beliefs. He spends a lot of time on the motivations and back stories, but after introducing the stories of the people killed at the beginning of the book he does leave, at least in my mind, questions about how some of the people close to the victims reacted.

2022-11-14 13:47