Posted by:
Nightingale
(
)
Date: July 08, 2024 08:37PM
The Amazon site that's advertising the book contains the “top review from Canada” here:
https://www.amazon.ca/Easy-Read-Lynn-Matthews-Anderson/dp/0964495708It’s long but it’s a fun read. I conclude the writer of this review is not a fan of the BoM.
Excerpt:
"One can read an abridgement of Joseph Smith Junior's tiresome narratives and pseudo-prophetical speeches and get through the unwelcome chore with welcome rapidity! There have been a few such abridgements over the years. Currently available is Lynn Matthews Anderson's simplified version of the BoM. Shortening it and putting Smith's contorted archaisms into modern and highly readable English, the reader can breeze his way through this piece of religious fiction in very short order. The BoM really does not merit any closer attention than what Anderson (who, be it noted, is a "true believer" and a member of the L.D.S. cult) makes of it, anyway, unless one addresses the BoM as a dutiful scholar or has to make use of it in apologetic endeavours, debate, and close analysis.
"Stripped of its pretentious aspirations, the BoM's narratives seem more trifling and foolish than inspiring. Anderson's prose is lean and straightforward, stripping the nonessentials of wording and detail away to leave the bare (even bald!) and unadorned accounts as the rather silly and arbitrary tales that they are. The many visions and speeches recounted in the BoM more obviously reveal themselves to the reader as the uncouth (but rudimentarily clever) confections from Biblical models, and gauchely awkward ones at that, which they are.
"Anderson makes her abridgement of the BoM from the accepted L.D.S. text of the work. There are many corruptions in the L.D.S. text, especially when compared to the more faithful R.L.D.S. editions of it, or, certainly, to the critical texts of the BoM which have been undertaken. However, such matters are of little import in using and commending a welcome abridgement such as Anderson's is. Get it, read it, and mostly forget about it, having done your reader's duty to history and to this bit of Americana lore!"