Joseph Smith (Penguin Lives)

In 1820, a tall New York teenager received a vision from two angels, warning him that all existing churches were corrupt abominations and that "he must join none of them." So Joseph Smith founded the Mormon church.

Robert Remini, the noted biographer of Andrew Jackson and historian of the Jacksonian era, locates Smith and the origins of the Mormon faith in the heady early-nineteenth-century epoch of religious evangelicalism. None of the many new sects and creeds that came out of that period has enjoyed the success of Smith's church, Remini notes. None has undergone the same intense degree of persecution, either, provoked by Smith's quest for secular political power and "such teachings as polygamy, eternal matter, baptism of the dead, a plurality of gods, men and women becoming gods themselves, [and] God the Father being once a man who passed through a stage of mortality before becoming God"--teachings that inspired charges of heresy, and that, in the end, cost Joseph Smith his life in what Remini calls an act of political assassination.

Remini delivers a nuanced, highly readable portrait of the controversial leader, one that sheds light on his time and beliefs and emphasizes his "striking human qualities." --Gregory McNamee