Biography / Memoir

Carefully researched and succinctly written, A Book of Mormons highlights seventy-eight historic figures. Photographs, little-known facts, and anecdotes vividly portray the public and private lives of prominent Mormon personalities. Included are all the presidents of the Church from Joseph Smith to Harold B. Lee, apostles and apostates, businessmen and educators, pioneers and politicians. The struggles and contributions of the Mormon Women are reflected in the lives of Lucy and Emma Smith, women's rights advocate Martha Hughes Cannon, and Church civic leaders such as Eliza R. Snow, Emmeline B. Wells, and Amy Brown Lyman. The authors' even-handed approach gives the reader an opportunity to evaluate the checkered careers of early leaders such as Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Sidney Rigdon, and John C. Bennett, authors Fanny Stenhouse, Frank J. Cannon, and Fawn Brodie, and renegades Bill Hickman and Orrin Porter Rockwell. Through a hundred and fifty years of Mormonism, the interaction of such strong and diverse personalities with one another and with their church makes A Book of Mormons a fascinating social history. [publisher blurb]

BX 8670 .V38b 1982