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Books: Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven”

I began this blog with a post about the companionship a book provides. Tucked inside a handbag, a suitcase, a backpack, it’s there for us.

That’s how I felt about Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a thick paperback I picked up, half-price, at a college bookstore. (The book I’d brought for the trip, Howard Norman’s “What is Left the Daughter,” was so bad I left it on the airplane. Plodding, predictable: curses on the reviewer who sent me to it!)

So there I was in the newly green Philadelphia suburbs without a book.

Their yard sale; my salvation.

How to describe this read? It’s not a straightforward survival tale, like his earlier books, “Into the Wild,” and “Into Thin Air.” Extreme behavior is their common thread, but this book is longer, richer, messier. Its footnotes could be a separate read.

“Under the Banner of Heaven” (2003) begins with the brutal death of a young mother and her child in 1984, then turns back and recounts the remarkable and often violent early days of the Mormon Church, beginning in 1830. How the one is linked to the other is, eventually, entirely logical.

Warning: this is not a fluid read. Back and forth and up and down North America, at least two dozen people’s stories color this book. I was never bored, but these real-life characters blend into each other.

Memorable: prophet and founder Joseph Smith, the brothers who murder, the woman and child they slaughter.

Throughout, I was astonished and disgusted by Krakauer’s descriptions of men’s actions in the name of God: polygamy, pedophile, rape, incest, swindling, kidnapping, racism, terror, murder.

If God instructed these men to murder, can they be held accountable? Are they fit to stand trial? Are all believers crazy?

An uncomfortable read. Fascinating history.

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