Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
This text provides an account of Taliban-like theocracies in the American heartland controlled by renegade Mormon prophets. At the core of the book is a double murder committed by a pair of brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they were commanded to kill by God. Beginning with an account of...
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This text provides an account of Taliban-like theocracies in the American heartland controlled by renegade Mormon prophets. At the core of the book is a double murder committed by a pair of brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they were commanded to kill by God. Beginning with an account of this "divinely inspired" crime, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered narrative of polygamy, savage violence and unyielding faith. Along the away he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America's fastest growing religion and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.
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Format: Audible Audio Edition
ASIN: B00017JIQE
Publish date: 2003-12-11
Publisher: Random House Audio
Edition language: English
This was not really the book I was expecting - a true crime nonfic with an exploration of the religious fanaticism that drove the murder, how man commits atrocities and somehow uses his God to justify it to himself and others, especially when God has conveniently provided him with a divine revelatio...
This extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities, where some 40,000 people still practice polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like t...
When a man kills a woman and her toddler in cold blood and claims god told him to do it, your first reaction is he must be crazy. Because only a crazy person would do that, right? Actually, he's quite rational under the construct of his belief system. The biggest and most disturbing takeaway from th...
Actual rating = 3.5. Very graphic descriptions of violence. Parts reminded me of In Cold Blood, but maybe even more disturbing. Gave me a nightmare that I murdered someone and was being chased by the police and my mom (who may or may not have been a police officer in the dream).
One thing I’ve noticed about Krakauer books is that I always feel as if the author wrote all the subjects for the book on index cards, threw them up in the air, collected them, and then shuffled them before writing. He seems to write a chapter based on one particular interview or idea rather than wr...
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