Review: Brodie, No Man Knows My History

[truepenny]

No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith by Fawn M. Brodie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Fawn M. Brodie's No Man Knows My History is an excellent biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. It is a very secular biography, since she gives no room to the hypothesis that Joseph Smith was actually visited by an angel named Moroni, but she is scrupulously fair to her subject and explores the ways in which Smith came to believe in his own story and his own powers. She writes very clearly, with a clean, engaging prose style, and she's very very good at piecing together the mosaic of sources, Mormon and anti-Mormon, to create the most three-dimensional figure of Smith that she can. Although it is by now a very old biography (first edition 1945, second edition 1971) it is still eminently readable and justifiably a classic.



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