2008 Dewey Decimal Project: 289.33 K
Jun. 26th, 2008 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rsadelleThis month's book is Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer, who you may have heard of as the author of Into the Wild, which, if you are a Di-Phi person, you may remember Lucky raving about.
Under the Banner of Heaven purports to tell the story of the murder of Brenda and Erica Lafferty by Ron and Dan Lafferty. To get to that, however, Krakauer covers the entire history of the Mormon church and its major fundamentalist spin-offs, with special attention paid to violence, polygamy, and the history of Mormons hearing directly from God. It's completely fascinating. It's especially fascinating if you've watched Big Love, because I kept seeing the genesis for those characters in the real-life people Krakauer talks to and about. (Mary Anne Mohanraj, at the polyamory panel at WisCon, said she lived in Utah for a while, and she said that "It's not my poly," but it's fairly true to life.)
I also love Krakauer's use of the footnote, so much so that I may next read The Footnote: A Curious History. There are a couple of footnotes noting permissions to use material, but the majority of them contribute useful information that doesn't fit neatly into the narrative. My favorite one tells us, "The part of town lying on the Arizona side of the line is officially called Colorado City, and the portion on the Utah side is officially named Hildale, although old-timers ignore both appellations, preferring to call it Short Creek, which was the town's name until 1962, when it was legally incorporated and renamed. The United Effort Plan is the legal name of the financial trust that owns all the church's assets, including virtually all the land in town."
If you're at all interested in the history of the Mormon church, which is, after all, an integral part of the history of the US (and possibly the future; Krakauer quotes Harold Bloom who says that "within sixty years governing the United States will become 'impossible without Mormon cooperation'"), I highly recommend the book. It's well-written, informative, and fascinating.
Under the Banner of Heaven purports to tell the story of the murder of Brenda and Erica Lafferty by Ron and Dan Lafferty. To get to that, however, Krakauer covers the entire history of the Mormon church and its major fundamentalist spin-offs, with special attention paid to violence, polygamy, and the history of Mormons hearing directly from God. It's completely fascinating. It's especially fascinating if you've watched Big Love, because I kept seeing the genesis for those characters in the real-life people Krakauer talks to and about. (Mary Anne Mohanraj, at the polyamory panel at WisCon, said she lived in Utah for a while, and she said that "It's not my poly," but it's fairly true to life.)
I also love Krakauer's use of the footnote, so much so that I may next read The Footnote: A Curious History. There are a couple of footnotes noting permissions to use material, but the majority of them contribute useful information that doesn't fit neatly into the narrative. My favorite one tells us, "The part of town lying on the Arizona side of the line is officially called Colorado City, and the portion on the Utah side is officially named Hildale, although old-timers ignore both appellations, preferring to call it Short Creek, which was the town's name until 1962, when it was legally incorporated and renamed. The United Effort Plan is the legal name of the financial trust that owns all the church's assets, including virtually all the land in town."
If you're at all interested in the history of the Mormon church, which is, after all, an integral part of the history of the US (and possibly the future; Krakauer quotes Harold Bloom who says that "within sixty years governing the United States will become 'impossible without Mormon cooperation'"), I highly recommend the book. It's well-written, informative, and fascinating.