Overview
Joseph Smith, America’s preeminent visionary and prophet, rose from a modest background to found the largest indigenous Christian church in American history. Without the benefit of wealth, education, or social position, he published the 584-page Book of Mormon when he was twenty-three; organized a church when he was twenty-four; and founded cities, built temples, and attracted thousands of followers before his violent death at age thirty-eight. Rather than perishing with him, Mormonism migrated to the Rocky Mountains, flourished there, and now claims millions of followers worldwide.
In Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Bushman, an esteemed American cultural historian and a practicing Mormon, tells how Smith formed a new religion from the ground up. Moving beyond the popular stereotype of Smith as a colorful fraud, the book explores the inner workings of his personality–his personal piety, his temper, his affection for family and friends, and his incredible determination. It describes how he received revelations and why his followers believed them.
Smith was a builder of cities. He sought to form egalitarian, just, and open communities under God and laid out a plan for ideal cities, which he hoped would fill the world. Adopted as the model for hundreds of Mormon settlements in the West, Smith’s urban vision may have left a more lasting imprint on the landscape than that of any other American.
He was controversial from his earliest years. His followers honored him as a man who spoke for God and restored biblical religion. His enemies maligned him as a dangerous religious fanatic, an American Mohammad, and drove the Mormons from every place in which they settled. Smith’s ultimate assassination by an armed mob raises the question of whether American democracy can tolerate visionaries.
The book gives more attention to Joseph Smith’s innovative religious thought than any previous biography. As Bushman writes, “His followers derived their energy and purpose from the religious world he brought into being.” Some of the teachings were controversial, such as property redistribution and plural marriage, but Smith’s revelations also delved into cosmology and the history of God. They spoke of the origins of the human personality and the purpose of life. While thoroughly Christian, Smith radically reconceived the relationship between humans and God. The book evaluates the Mormon prophet’s bold contributions to Christian theology and situates him culturally in the modern world.
Published on the two hundredth anniversary of Smith’s birth, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling is an in-depth portrayal of the mysterious figure behind one of the world’s fastest growing faiths.
Synopsis
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.
The New York Times - Walter Kirn
Bushman's Smith, whatever else he was, comes off as a singularly brilliant motivator whose method - call it Dynamic Overextension - modern students of management would do well to study. By perpetually promising the world to a mixed bag of followers that included preachers picked off from other sects, Smith not only captured hundreds, then thousands, of minds, he harnessed their muscles, too. From New York he led his pilgrims to Ohio, only to tell them once they'd settled down that Zion lay in Missouri, much farther west, and that many of them would have to pack their things again.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Richard Lyman Bushman entitled one of his books Believing History: Latter Day Saint Essays, thus addressing directly his intention to write "faithful history" about the Mormon past. With this 768-page biography of LDS founder Joseph Smith, Dr. Bushman, an emeritus professor at Columbia University, has now created the tour de force of his long career. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling presents his subject as an authentic prophet but also as the unpolished stone that he described himself to be. Mormons will greet this book as perhaps the definitive and certainly one of the best-written, carefully researched biographies of the founder of their sect. Non-Mormons will welcome it as a hospitable introduction to a major 19th-century American.The New Yorker
Joseph Smith claimed that he was visited by an angel who gave him golden plates from which he transcribed the Book of Mormon, and he had organized a church before he was twenty-five. His personal charisma and his administrative genius helped spread Mormonism throughout the Western United States, turning the sect into a legislative federation complete with social and political institutions. There were always those who thought Smith a charlatan and a fanatic, and, in 1844, at the age of thirty-eight, he was fatally shot by an angry mob. Bushman is both an emeritus professor of history at Columbia and a practicing Mormon, and his exhaustive biography carefully treads a path between reverence and objectivity, as when he investigates the phenomenon of “plural marriage”; Smith, in order to establish “a Righteous race . . . uppon the Earth,” had more than thirty wives.Walter Kirn
Bushman's Smith, whatever else he was, comes off as a singularly brilliant motivator whose method - call it Dynamic Overextension - modern students of management would do well to study. By perpetually promising the world to a mixed bag of followers that included preachers picked off from other sects, Smith not only captured hundreds, then thousands, of minds, he harnessed their muscles, too. From New York he led his pilgrims to Ohio, only to tell them once they'd settled down that Zion lay in Missouri, much farther west, and that many of them would have to pack their things again.— The New York Times