Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
This extraordinary work of investigative journalism by Jon Krakauer takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities, where some 40,000 people still practice polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer ...show more
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Community Reviews
I really wanted to give this book 4 stars. But, it was to one sided for me. Krakauer does a great job on interweaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their Mormon Fundamentalist murders along with the back ground story of the entire Mormon Church. However, through the stories it seemed that Mormons were either a) killers b) anti government conservative nut jobs and/ or c) polygamists that only wanted to marry as many women as possible a...read more
Read May 2022
Obsessed! I love all things religion, cults, and true crime so this was perfect. Loved the style of writing and it led me to read more of his books as well.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to add this one on here because it’s nonfiction and took a while to read but this book was incredibly interesting and I learned a lot. I’ve always been interested in true crime and religious extremism and this combines both in a tasteful yet insightful manner. This author also wrote Into the Wild which was one of my favorite books in high school. Will give a trigger warning there is a lot of themes of domestic abuse, ...read more
Really interesting look at the history of Mormonism and the course of the fundamentalist polygamist splitter groups. I felt bad for my Mormon friends that there's no discussion of how normal and kind the central LDS group is.
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