Herein are some very interesting books about Mormonism – the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (about whom you can learn here).
The text elucidating the books comes from Amazon.com
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Mormon Origami by Todd Huisken You no longer have to worry about sacrament programs being folded into paper airplanes; now, your kids can fold CTR shields, pioneer handcarts, or the Salt Lake Temple! As you develop the unique skill of creating these simple-to-intermediate origami designs, you will find opportunities to use them with all ages for lessons, activities, crafting, and everyday fun!
Unveiling Grace: The Story of How We Found Our Way out of the Mormon Church by Lynn K. Wilder
From a rare insider’s point of view, Unveiling Grace looks at how Latter-day Saints are ‘wooing our country’ with their religion, lifestyle, and culture. It is also a gripping story of how an entire family, deeply enmeshed in Mormonism, found their way out and what they can tell others about their lives as faithful Mormons.
Leave me alone: Memoirs of an Exmormon by B.E. Hewson
Popping fights and picking cherries—cutting ties with the Mormon church is culture shock at its finest. In a new trans-genre form that combines short stories, short prose, and poetry, B.E. Hewson anthologizes the memories, emotions, and imaginings of a faith-failed adolescent colliding with an uninviting world. Virginity, rejection, familial angst, ignorance, fear, heartbreaking hope—Leave me alone captures snapshots of life in limbo between two worlds, a life struggling to break the barriers of a sheltered past only to find a cruel and unadjusted awakening. Readers will be intrigued and unnerved at Hewson’s unflinching honesty. In the tradition of authors like Steinbeck and Salinger, the mental and physical realism leaves no stone unturned and no lie undiscovered. Readers may be offended or uncomfortable. Readers may be confused or surprised. But one thing is for sure, readers will breech new territory. Never before has an author tried to portray the confines of growing up in a Mormon home and the chaos of never believing. Through many characters and many speakers, an overall consciousness emerges that speaks to the fornication and fortification of faith and femininity.
I’m (No Longer) a Mormon: A Confessional by Regina Samuelson
Now in her 30’s, Regina Samuelson has decided she can no longer be Mormon. This is not as easy as one would imagine: She was born in the church, educated at BYU, married in the temple, and is raising more Mormons. She faced a serious conundrum: keep quiet (and avoid losing everything dear to her), or tell the world what being raised LDS does to a person’s psyche, especially when they realize that everything they were taught and everything they hoped to believe is a lie. To expose the difficulty faced by Mormons who leave the Church and to seek support for their plight, Regina offers a first-person confessional memoir recounting her many atrocious experiences, managing to weave in enough humor to keep you turning pages, and enough brutal honesty to bring you to an understanding of what it is to be a Mormon, and to try to leave it behind…
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. He now shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders, taking readers inside isolated American communities where some 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists 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 only to God. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.
The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception by J.B. Haws
What do Americans really think about Mormons, and why? Through a fascinating survey of Mormon encounters with the media, including such personalities and events as the Osmonds, the Olympics, the Tabernacle Choir, Evangelical Christians, the Equal Rights Amendment, Sports Illustrated, and even Miss America, J.B. Haws reveals the dramatic transformation of the American public’s understanding of Mormons in the past half-century. When the Mormon George Romney, former governor of Michigan, ran for president in 1968, he was admired for his personal piety and characterized as “a kind of political Billy Graham.” When George’s son Mitt ran in 2008, a widely distributed email told hundreds of thousands of Christians that a vote for Mitt Romney was a vote for Satan. What had changed in the intervening four decades? Why were the theology of the Latter-day Saints and their “Christian” status mostly nonissues in 1968 but so hotly contested in 2008? For years, the American perception of Mormonism has been torn between admiration for individual Mormons-seen as friendly, hard-working, and family-oriented-and ambivalence toward institutional Mormonism-allegedly secretive, authoritarian, and weird.
The Mormon Image in the American Mind offers vital insight into the complex shifts in public perception of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its members, and its place in American society.
The Mormon Prophet and His Harem: Or, An Authentic History of Brigham Young, His Numerous Wives and Children by Mrs. C. V. Waite
This is a biography of Brigham Young, though the author was clearly not a fan. For an idea of the tone, here’s the preface: No apology is offered for presenting to the public the only authentic account of Brigham Young, of his polygamous family, and of that complicated and incongruous system of social and political machinery, called Mormonism. The only form of religion in this country which refuses to conform either to the spirit of progress and improvement and enlightened humanity which characterizes the age in which we live, or to our laws and the genius of our free institutions,—drawing constantly from foreign countries hosts of votaries, impelled hither not by a love of republicanism, but rather by a desire to exchange a political for a religious monarchy,—is Mormonism, which presents an antagonism to our Government, and can scarcely fail to result in national trouble.
The Mormon Menace The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite by John Doyle Lee
Published in 1905, this is the confession of John Doyle Lee, who was found solely guilty of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah and executed in 1877.
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