Now this was an interesting book to read! Krakauer writes in his usual clear journalistic style about a brutal killing of a young woman and her baby in 1984 by a couple of fundamentalist Mormons. The book not only explains the events leading to the killing and the aftermath, but also follows the thread from the killers’ fundamental religious beliefs all the way back to the start of Mormonism by Joseph Smith in the 1820s.
The journalistic tone of Krakauer’s writing is especially appreciated as he describes the beliefs and history of the Mormon church and the various branches and divisions. I was struck by the history of violence and the degradation of women and racial minorities that were at the root of early Mormonism.
The book describes the story of how Joseph Smith started to get messages from God, digging up mysterious gold plates and using glow in the dark rocks to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. Most of these stories and messages seemed more than a little self-serving for the young prophet. The stories seemed childish to me reading in 2021, and I felt like it would be hard for rational people (even 200 years ago) to accept this stuff as real – but the author points out that looking at just about any religion’s holy books you’d feel the same way. I wholeheartedly agree – that’s why I tend to avoid all religions.
One key element in this book is the Mormon idea of “plural marriages” – or polygamy. Men are seen as the heads of families (and men alone) and women are collected as belongings (sort of like cattle). Some of the key figures in Mormon history were marrying multiple women, sleeping with their own children, and not exactly setting good moral examples. It is clear from the history outlined in this book that this practice of “plural marriage” was stopped only after great resistance, and there are hints of it still happening in splinter groups of the Mormon Church even today.
So this was an eye-opening book that was helpful to learn about part of American history and culture that I didn’t really know much about. Near the end of the book the author interviews a man who left the Mormon church. He had proven himself quite clever as a young man in the church so the church leadership sent him off to a university to be trained as a teacher. And as he started to learn and think for himself in this place of higher learning he realized that what he had been fed his whole life back at the church didn’t align with the reality of the outside world. This story really reinforced for me the importance of education and critical thinking for young people. Any sort of religion that discourages this would seem to me to be suspect.
The next book is Nose Dive by Harold McGee – a deep analysis of how smells (in food and elsewhere) are created and how we perceive them.
