There are not very many contemporary accounts of Mormonism in which the author is expelled from the Hill Cumorah Pageant. Avi Steinberg was not passing out illicit evangelical tracts to audience members, nor was he smoking pot behind the LDS Visitors Center. Instead, he was rehearsing for the show under an assumed name. “Like a sinner,” Steinberg confides, “I felt somewhat relieved to be caught.”
Steinberg’s The Lost Book of Mormon is a romp through the Book of Mormon’s certain and uncertain setting, from Jerusalem to Central America to western New York to (almost) the Garden of Eden. It’s a book about an underappreciated scripture, but perhaps even more about the uncertainty facing all aspiring writers and also about young people who find themselves an ill fit for their religious environs. Along the way, Steinberg’s self-reflective self-doubt sometimes threatens to overshadow his story (but turns out to be a critical part of that story). And his summaries of Mormon history sometimes feature more wit than accuracy. In 1834, Joseph Smith marched to Missouri from Ohio in an attempt to recover the Saints’ Jackson County properties, not to “explore sites for future settlement in the Missouri Territory.” Smith did not leave behind quite so many as “at least forty-eight grieving widows,” though one could allow that whether the figure was thirty-three or forty-eight is not the most germane question. His tone will rankle faithful Latter-day Saint readers, as when he terms Emma Smith the prophet’s “number-one wife” or Joseph Smith a “small-time neighborhood sorcerer.” In the end, though, The Lost Book of Mormon is funny, winsome, and thoughtful.
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