An Honest Look at a Latter Day Saint

Nineteenth-century America was a land of prophets unseen since ancient Israel. These preachers roamed the frontier, erecting churches and gathering followings. One obscure but particularly extreme example from Ohio "jumped off a riverbank in an attempt to catch the heavenly message." Another, born into an obscure family of hardscrabble New York farmers, soon passed into the very same rural Midwestern town. Surrounded by failed apostles, this one would go on to build a church with 17 million adherents. In the new biography Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, John G. Turner sets out to discover what separated Joseph Smith from his contemporaries.

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