“There is so much I enjoyed about this work. My copy has dozens
of dog-eared pages that I have marked with enthusiastic notes. This will be an indispensable volume for the next generations of graduate students and scholars.”
—Christopher James Blythe, faculty research associate, Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University
“This book was a breath of fresh air, and will probably help craft better histories about Joseph Smith going forward.”
—Association for Mormon Letters
“This definitely is not just another volume on the Latter-day Saint prophet Joseph Smith, but a concise, meticulous reconsideration of an ordinary man who was fated to become a seer, prophet, and founder of a world religion. It is a masterpiece that rests on enormous research and a complex understanding of Joseph Smith not only as a man of the nineteenth century and the founding prophet of Mormonism, but also as integral to the nineteenth-century cultural, political, and religious history of the United States. This is a book long overdue.”
—Nova Religio