The Lost Book of Mormon: A Journey Through the Mythic Lands of Nephi, Zarahemla, and Kansas City, Missouri
(By Avi Steinberg)
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Is the Book of Mormon the Great American Novel? Decades before Ishmael’s ship embarked on its search for Moby Dick, before Huck Finn set out on his adventures along the Mississippi, a farm hand and child seer named Joseph Smith unearthed a long-buried book from a haunted hill in western New York State, a discovery that radically transformed his life and that marked the ambitious start of the American literary project. Using his prophetic gift, Joseph translated the mysterious book—which told of an epic hidden history of ancient America, a story about a family that fled biblical Jerusalem and took a boat to the New World—and published it under the title The Book of Mormon. The book caused an immediate sensation, sparking anger and violence, boycotts and jealousy, curiosity and wonder, and launched Joseph on a wild, decades-long adventure across the American West.
Today, the Book of Mormon, one of the most widely circulating works of American literature, continues to cause controversy—which is why most of us know very little about the story it tells.
Avi Steinberg wants to change that. A fascinated nonbeliever, Steinberg spent a year and a half on a personal quest, traveling the path laid out by Joseph’s epic. From Jerusalem, where the Book of Mormon opens with a bloody murder, to the ruined Maya cities of Central America—the setting for most of the Book of Mormon’s ancient story—where Steinberg gallivanted with a boisterous bus tour of believers exploring Maya archaeological sites for evidence. From there, to upstate New York, where he participated in the true Book of Mormon musical, the annual Hill Cumorah Pageant, an elaborate dramatization of the saga staged directly on the hill where Joseph unearthed the book; and finally to the center of the American continent, Jackson County, Missouri, the spot Joseph identified as none other than the site of the Garden of Eden.
Threaded through this quirky travelogue is an argument for taking the Book of Mormon seriously as a work of American imagination, as a story about us. And also an answer to the question: Why are we so afraid of the Book of Mormon? Literate and funny, personal and provocative, the genre-bending Lost Book of Mormon boldly explores our deeply human impulse to write bibles and discovers the abiding power of story.”
