Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

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Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling is a biography of Joseph Smith Jr., founder and prophet of the Latter Day Saint movement. The title of the book refers to a self-description by Smith, repeated by Brigham Young. Richard Bushman, both a practicing Mormon and Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University, is the author of many books on early American cultural and religious history. Bushman's background enables him to locate Joseph Smith in the historical and cultural context of early nineteenth-century America, which created fertile ground for a number of new religious movements.

Although the seven-hundred page biography does not avoid controversial aspects of Smith's life and work, such as his practice of polygamy and his youthful treasure-seeking, it treats them cautiously and somewhat blandly.^[1] Rough Stone Rolling makes use of much recent research and is the most complete biography of Joseph Smith published to date, but it lacks the literary distinction ^[2] of Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History (1945), a biography that presents Smith as a gifted fraud.^[3]

[edit] Publication data

Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Alfred Knopf, 2005, ISBN 1-4000-4270-4

[edit] References

^ For instance, Jane Lampman writing for the Christian Science Monitor notes that Bushman "sanitizes Smith's motives for establishing polygamy and marrying dozens of wives." CSM, December 17, 2005; Walter Kirn says that when reading Bushman's biography, "the reader despairs of ever finding out whether Smith was God's own spokesman or the L. Ron Hubbard of his day." New York Times Book Review, January 15, 2006, 14-15.
^ See Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books, November 17, 2005, 35-37. McMurtry says that in reading Bushman, it is difficult to determine "where biography ends and apologetics begins."
^ Jan Shipps, a preeminent non-LDS scholar of Mormonism who rejects Brodie's thesis, nevertheless has called No Man Knows My History a "beautifully written biography...the work of a mature scholar [that] represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life."