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    Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
    Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
    Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
    Audiobook28 hours

    Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

    Written by Richard Lyman Bushman

    Narrated by James Anderson Foster

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Founder of the largest indigenous Christian church in American history, Joseph Smith published the 584-page Book of Mormon when he was twenty-three and went on to organize a church, found cities, and attract thousands of followers before his violent death at age thirty-eight. Richard Bushman, an esteemed cultural historian and a practicing Mormon, moves beyond the popular stereotype of Smith as a colorful fraud to explore his personality, his relationships with others, and how he received revelations. An arresting narrative of the birth of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling also brilliantly evaluates the prophet’s bold contributions to Christian theology and his cultural place in the modern world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 24, 2018
    ISBN9781541488717
    Author

    Richard Lyman Bushman

    Richard Lyman Bushman is Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and the author of many books, including Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling and Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Charles Warren Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, and the American Antiquarian Society. He co-founded and is chairman of the Board of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts.

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    Reviews for Joseph Smith

    4.5/5

    147 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Very objective take from a practicing latter day saint. To me, learning more of the "restorer" of Christ's church on earth was enlightening. Thank you for your work.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Whether you believe he is a prophet or a con artist, this is as objective of a review of Joseph Smith as you are going to get.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I found this book to be a very well researched and written biography of a very controversial man. As a believer, I found that the book was balanced. I was very familiar with most of the items in this book previously - the information provided enriched my viewpoint of a man that I consider a prophet. I suppose that most people don't know what to expect from a prophet, or I should say, they have a preconceived notion of what to expect. To many people, that notion did not match up with the reality of Joseph Smith. As Joseph himself says, "you never knew my heart" - the same can be said for each one of us to even our closet associates. We only know ourselves, and even at that we are imperfect.
    • 4/5
      Richard Lyman Bushman is a recognized and distinguished historian. He is also a believing, practicing Mormon. So, though his book is the best researched biography of Mormon prophet and founder Joseph Smith and well-written, it is also a sly apologetic for Joseph Smith.

      First, the good. It is a fine update when compared to Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History, which was written by a historian who was an apostate from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There is some good new material out there that Brodie never had. Also, while Bushman's book suffers from being too laudatory of Joseph Smith, Brodie's book suffered from always taking the negative when it came to Smith. (Though, I lean more towards Brodie's less than flattering view of Joseph Smith.)

      Now, the bad. There are numerous instances where Bushman tries to explain away any bad aspects of Joseph Smith's life, character, and prophethood. There are numerous instances where Bushman just takes Joseph Smith's word for it. (Or some random Mormon apologist's word for it.)

      Bushman does not see the Smith family's sorcery, magick, and money-digging treasure seeking as signs of occult practices and devilry, but actually states that it was necessary for the Smith family to believe in spirits, angels, and magick in order for them to believe the spirits, angels, and miracles of Mormonism. Bushman treads down the well-trod path of stating that the unschooled Joseph Smith was too uneducated to have come up with the complex Book of Mormon out of his own head: it must be God-breathed. (Or, as later Mormon doctrine would have it, one-of-the-planetary-gods-breathed.) Joseph Smith could have written the meandering mess. He was a smart enough fellow. Bushman blithely and naïvely accepts Joseph Smith's version of the "lost 116 pages" incident. Bushman accepts Martin Harris's faulty account of the Anthon transcript debacle. Bushman absolves Joseph Smith of blame for almost any bad incident, be it the anti-Bank in Kirtland, or the fiasco of Zion's Camp, or the idea that Adam-ondi-Ahman is where Adam and Eve lived. Take Bushman's account of the Book of Abraham and the Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith supposedly translated. Bushman has a large section trying to explain why Joseph Smith's translation of the rather late (400 BC), standard Egyptian funerary documents are not really a translation but an inspired "translation" that just used the papyri as a springboard for divine revelation. It's a sad attempt to absolve Joseph Smith of fabrication and mendacity. We have sections of Joseph Smith's papyri still extant. They are nothing like the "Book of Abraham" (written directly by the biblical patriarch Abraham!) Joseph Smith said they were. And the "Egyptian Characters" document Bushman fobs off on Joseph Smith's secretaries. Bushman absolves Joseph Smith of any blame for the Danites and their actions, though he has to admit that Joseph Smith spoke at Danite meetings all over Missouri. Bushman absolves Joseph Smith of any wrongdoing in the Missouri Mormon War. Bushman mentions but then quickly dismisses Joseph Smith's "translation" of the Kinderhook plates, which were a hoax from the get-go. (Shouldn't a prophet had known that? But, no, Joseph Smith declares: "I have translated a portion of [the plates] and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found. He was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth.")

      Pshaw!

      The worst, though, is how Bushman tries to absolve Joseph Smith of any moral turpitude when it comes to polygamy. Bushman takes Joseph Smith's argument at face value in the Fanny Alger affair, when Joseph Smith said, basically, "Hey, it wasn't technically adultery, was it?" Poor Oliver Cowdery. And the Bushman tries to insinuate several times that Joseph Smith wasn't marrying women for sexual reasons, just for spiritual, religious reasons. "Look he wed an old lady," Bushman basically says. But then he is forced to slyly and quickly admit several paragraphs later that Joseph Smith is indeed bedding some of his teenaged and twentysomething plural wives. And, again, Bushman takes Joseph Smith's word when it comes to polygamy. Joseph Smith straight up told people and his congregations (and for a long time his wife) that he was not practicing polygamy, when indeed he was (ostensibly because he viewed society's definition of polygamy differently than he viewed his idea of Mormon plural wives). I'm sorry, but Joseph Smith let his "prophecy" and power go to his head and started bedding the comely daughters of his friends (a true cultic power play), and threatened the young, deluded girls with hellfire and damnation if they did not bend to his (and "God's") will. It's sad and degenerate, and Bushman downplays and excuses all the lies and skullduggery behind it. Bushman doesn't mention, for instance, that one of Joseph Smith's prophecies, it's in the official Doctrines and Covenants, a scripture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 132:51-54, that God would destroy Joseph Smith's wife Emma if she did not accept Joseph Smith's plural wives. Destroy. Bushman doesn't mention it. (Doctrine and Covenants 132:51-54: " And let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph.... But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law." Destroy!)

      Phooey!

      Because this book is so fawning to Joseph Smith and so much of an apologia for his "prophecy," skullduggery, and turpitude, it fails as a definitive biography of Joseph Smith. I would recommend Fawn Brodie's work first. Then read this one for an opposite view, then read Remini's short bio for a sort of middle ground. (Then read Turner's Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet/, then read anything by Jerald and Sandra Tanner.)
    • 3/5
      Bushman is a respected historian and a devout Mormon. The blend didn’t work for me when Bushman got into commentary on Smith’s revelations. The rest of the history is interesting, and you definitely get a sense almost despite Bushman of how frustrating it was to deal with Smith, but Bushman repeatedly insists that, given Smith’s limited education and poor upbringing, it’s hard to imagine how he could have come up with such elaborate stories, especially ones that have some correspondences with other Biblical apocrypha, absent divine inspiration. I have a couple of things to say about that. (1) Humans are really inventive and creative, even ones from bad circumstances! It’s kind of our thing. Bushman sounds like a Shakespeare truther when he insists that such a lowly creature couldn’t have created an elaborate cosmology. (2) Bushman acknowledges that prophets of Smith’s type were thick on the ground in the US and England in this period, as part of the Christian revival that was ongoing, but he neglects the resulting base-rate problem: even if we accept that producing an elaborate, successful set of revelations was unlikely for any given prophet, people do win lotteries! Bushman is of course free to believe, but I wish he hadn’t neglected the idea of survivor bias if he was going to opine on the unlikelihood of non-divine revelations. (3) As for correspondences, the corollary of human inventiveness is our tendency towards tropes. I’m actually not shocked that both Smith and earlier apocrypha independently produced a story of Abraham’s father worshiping idols in Abraham’s pre-Yahweh youth—are you?
    • 5/5
      Can a biographer - Mormon or not - use words like "revelation" without quotation marks? As a "believing historian," what other choice can Richard Lyman Bushman make? Unlike Robert Remini, a non-Mormon author of a life of Joseph Smith, Mr. Bushman does not write about Smith's "alleged" visions. To do so would be to imply a degree of skepticism and refute the very idea that there can be such a figure as a "believing historian."
      "Believing historian" may seem a contradiction in terms. History is not about belief but evidence. But biography is also about a specific person and his world, and thus the genre evokes events as the subject saw them. Joseph Smith understood that his story was incredible. If an angel had appeared to another man and provided golden plates which the man was instructed to translate, from the "reform Egyptian," into a new bible, "The Book of Mormon," Smith said he would not have believed it.
      Smith was in his early 20s when he experienced his encounter with the angel Moroni. Poorly educated, he was nevertheless put in charge of sacred texts that no one else could touch - let alone read - on pain of death. So the angel admonished Joseph, as Mormons call him. Joseph, as Mr. Bushman also calls him, never claimed he was dictating to his amanuenses the literal word of God. He was doing the best he could.
      Such is the Joseph Smith, rough as a rolling stone, that Mr. Bushman brilliantly portrays in "Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling" (Alfred A. Knopf, 740 pages, $35). Often called a prophet, Joseph was, more properly speaking, a revelator. He simply told people what God and his angels said to him. To be sure, "The Book of Mormon" reflects Joseph's autobiography and the Second Great Awakening that Robert Remini explored so well as he situated Smith in the context of Jacksonian America.
      Mr. Bushman is aware of cultural context, but his work builds on more than 18 other biographies - most importantly, Fawn Brodie's "No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith," published in 1945 and revised in 1970.While Brodie was not a believing historian, she made it difficult to dismiss Joseph Smith as delusional or a charlatan. In her careful analysis, "The Book of Mormon" could not be rejected as just a potpourri of pseudobiblical stories.
      It is Mr. Bushman's treatment of "The Book of Mormon" that makes this biography a stunning accomplishment. Once again, he begins with Brodie, a Mormon who broke with her church. She saw the text differently from critics who called it "chloroform in print" (Mark Twain) and "a yeasty fermentation, formless, aimless and inconceivably absurd" (Bernard DeVoto). On the contrary, Brodie replied: "Its structure shows elaborate design, its narrative is spun coherently, and it demonstrates throughout a unity of purpose."
      Mr. Bushman reports these various opinions, but provides his own captivating interpretation. He calls "The Book of Mormon" an "elaborate framed tale of Mormon telling about a succession of prophets telling about their encounters with God. Read in the twenty-first century, the book seems almost postmodern in its self-conscious attention to the production of the text." Such sentences seem aimed at English departments looking for a new text to mine. Certainly, Mr. Bushman feels that "The Book of Mormon" has never been accorded its rightful place in American literature. His aim is not 1179 2174 1293 2185to gain Mormon converts but to show how "The Book of Mormon" is in its own right a legitimate literary work in the same sense the Bible is: "Although the book is above all a religious history of prophesying, preaching, faithfulness, and apostasy, Mormon evokes an entire world."
      Mr. Bushman acknowledges that proponents of the text "face an uphill battle in resisting this onslaught" of critics who have termed it fictitious and deemed any defense of the book's authenticity as hopeless. Yet he draws on the research of Mormons and non-Mormons alike to show that "The Book of Mormon" cannot be explained away as a novel masquerading as scripture.
      Like the Bible, "The Book of Mormon" is a narrative, not a treatise, the biographer emphasizes. Careful reading shows that both early Mormons and their critics misunderstood the book, applying too many of its stories to an American setting. Mr. Bushman disperses these distortions when he writes that "The Book of Mormon" "deposited its people on some unknown shore - not even definitely identified as America - and had them live out their history in a remote place in a distant time, using names that had no connections to modern Indians. All modern readers had to go on was the reference to a 'narrow neck of land.' "
      Although "The Book of Mormon" is often regarded as a text that explains the origins of American Indians as the lost tribes of Israel, Mr. Bushman finds very little evidence that this is so and concludes that the book "seems more focused on its own Christian message than on Indian anthropology. The book refuses to argue its own theory."
      So why were Mormons persecuted? Why was Joseph Smith assassinated? Why does the church he founded not only endure but thrive? On the one hand, "The Book of Mormon" "challenges biblical authority" - even suggesting that the good book may contain errors. Smith's contemporaries viewed him as a spiritual and political threat (he ran for the presidency), with a fanatical church and a private army that menaced American institutions. On the other hand, "The Book of Mormon" as a new revelation, a reformist Christian text, attracted converts dissatisfied with conventional Christian denominations and longing for the return of revelation. Although Mr. Bushman does not quite put it this way, "The Book of Mormon" is a work of both affirmation and dissent.
      More than that, "The Book of Mormon" has a universalist message; the "American story does not control the narrative," Mr. Bushman writes. It does not celebrate democracy, the biographer insists, but "endlessly expounds the master biblical narrative - the history of Israel." The text proposes, in Mr. Bushman's words, "a new purpose for America: becoming a realm of righteousness rather than an empire of liberty."
      If I have focused on Mr. Bushman's interpretation of "The Book of Mormon," it is because he brings his discussion back to biography - its power and its limitations: Biographical analysis runs the risk of making creative works little more than a mirror of the author's life. As one critic puts it, "the book is far grander, much broader, and its internal logic and power go well beyond
      the life of Joseph Smith."

      By delineating the boundaries of biography so sensitively,Mr.Bushman has paradoxically enhanced its authority.
    • 4/5
      While this is a book with a bias (there's no such thing as unbiased opinions when it comes to religion or politics) and while Mr. Bushman, dubbed 'the Mormon explainer' is a believer, he examines the religious sect and its cultural influences with an unflinching eye. Whether you're a believer or a skeptic, there's a lot to learn from this book. Fully entrenched members will be forced to look at a history that is largely untaught, and perhaps ask themselves some tough questions, while skeptics should (at least I hope) come to a better understanding of a people and a culture steeped in folklore and misunderstanding. It's an interesting look at the forces that what went into the shaping of this country and the challenges placed upon the constitution during our nation's, and particularly the West's, formative years. At 740 pages, it took me a while to get through, and though I went into it with many questions, I came out with a broader understanding, but with many questions still remaining. For the curious, this is an intriguing read.
    • 4/5
      A highly respected and respectable bio. My one query of Prof. Bushman's praiseworthy effort is this: Why ignore the Jan.4, 1833 letter which Joseph Smith sent to N. C. Saxton, the editor of the American Revivalist and Rochester Observer, part of which was published in that paper Feb. 2, 1833 and the remainder of which is preserved in the LDS Church Archives? In this letter Joseph accurately predicts the devastations of the Civil War which began 28 years later, the establishment of the Jews in Jerusalem which occurred 134 years later as well as the large-scale conversions and immigrations from Canada, Britain, and Scandinavia which took place throughout the rest of the 19th century, mostly after his martyrdom in 1844. Was the honored professor put off by the unlearned literary style of this letter or did he perhaps wish to portray Joseph Smith more as a forthteller than a foreteller? In my view Brother Joseph was both and deserves credit as both.