Will I love No Man Knows My History?

I shouldn't be recommending this book. Its sources are limited. Its psychological approach to its subject is outdated. Worst of all, its author earned degrees in literature, not history! (I'm a history professor.) But I don't care.

I find this book electrifying. It is the work of a dogged gumshoe investigator, a mother in her 20s, who relentlessly dug up the long-concealed secrets of one of America's most extraordinary national stories: the life and death of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-Day Saints movement.

This book shows the most thrilling part of being a historian: finding things out. "No man… show more.

This biography of Joseph Smith although first published nearly eighty years ago is still the best account of the founder of Mormonism. It caused a sensation when it came out in 1945.

Its author, the 30-year-old Fawn Brodie, member of a prominent Mormon family, was excommunicated by the Church of Latter Day Saints. Despite being nearly eighty years old – it was revised and reissued in 1971 – and the subject of controversy in the Mormon church, this is a brilliant work of biography. Brodie writes extremely well and she knows the Mormon world and its belief system from within.

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“Brodie saw the fraud at the heart of Mormonism,” according to Larry McMurtry, and she described it with style and panache – at considerable personal cost. Her uncle, a future Church president, denounced her and participated in her ex-communication.