List Price: £7.99 Price: £5.99 You save: £2.00 (25%)
Media: Paperback Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Editorial Review:
Under the Banner of Heaven is a riveting read. The Lafferty boys were brought up in a squeaky clean All-American family. So what made two of them follow revelations from God to slit the throat of their ex-beauty queen sister-in-law and her infant daughter? The problem was that they got involved in the fundamentalist, survivalist wing of the Mormon Church.
Author Jon Krakauer expertly jumps from the immediate horror of the Lafferty boys to the context of Mormonism and the wider questions of religious violence. In the process we are taken on a house of horrors ride through the badlands of fundamentalist Mormon religion. Krakauer introduces us to red necks with more than 30 "wives"--many who were "married" in their early teens. It's a story of fraud, child abuse, incest, physical violence and spiritual and emotional rape at a deep level.
The contemporary story is lurid and shocking, but as Krakauer relates the picaresque story of Joseph Smith--the founder of the Mormon religion--you realise that present day fundamentalist Mormons are far closer to their founder in spirit and behaviour than the more squeaky clean manifestations of modern Mormonism. This well researched and tightly written account gives a great potted history of Mormonism and illuminates the psychotic fringes of religious mentality. In doing so it reveals the wild dangers of spiritual free wheeling and the need for caution and restraint in religion. --Dwight Longenecker
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
Brilliant account of a religion and how it lead to a modern day murder Brilliant account of a religion and how it lead to the murder of innocents by people carrying out what they thought was God's work. Sound familiar? This is a stunning book. It so incredibly well researched and written that despite the amount of details you don't ever lose your way. It describes everything so richly that you almost feel part of events. A warning though - it makes the retelling of the actual murders all the more harrowing and almost unreadable at one point. I'd like to think it's... more info
Not a book for adventure-writing fans. I came to this book after "Into the Wild" and "Into Thin Air" ,both of which I enjoyed immensely. This effort is really a potted history of Mormonism , about which I don't give a dinky-do. If it wasn't for the authors style, I would have given it 1*.
If like me, you like adventure/travel, stear clear of it.
Under The Banner Of Heaven 'Under The Banner Of Heaven' is written with Jon Krakauer's usual easily read and digested style and tells the story not only of the Mormon fundamentalist murder of a mother and baby in the early 1980's, but also the history of the Mormon faith. Knowing nothing about Mormons, this historical aspect of the book really added to my overall understanding of the murders (and what may have lead to them) and the two aspects of this book are weaved together perfectly. The parts about the murders are shocking and a... more info
Brilliant Another substantial nail in the coffin of religious fundamentalism. Gives the reader another perspective on those smart "elders" in black suits and ties knocking on doors. Utterly compelling and anger inducing.
