The ""Book of Mormon"": A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books), Gutjahr^+

The Book of MormonA Biography\nAuthor(s): Paul C. Gutjahr\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Princeton University Press, United States\nImprint: Princeton University Press\nISBN-13: 9780691144801, 978-0691144801\nSynopsis\nLate one night in 1823 Joseph Smith, Jr. was reportedly visited in his family's farmhouse in upstate New York by an angel named Moroni. According to Smith, Moroni told him of a buried stack of gold plates that were inscribed with a history of the Americas' ancient peoples, and which would restore the pure Gospel message as Jesus had delivered it to them. Thus began the unlikely career of the \""Book of Mormon\"", the founding text of the Mormon religion, and perhaps the most important sacred text ever to originate in the United States. Here, Paul Gutjahr traces the life of this book as it has formed and fractured different strains of Mormonism and transformed religious expression around the world. Gutjahr looks at how the \""Book of Mormon\"" emerged from the burned-over di.