Book #75 was Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer. The back of the book reads:

Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under the Banner of Heaven, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this “divinely inspired” crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five “plural wives,” several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.

Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.

I read this book as a matter of curiosity. It was actually recommended to us by Scott’s brother, who is married to a Mormon girl. And really, I’ve learned more about Mormonism in the last 5 years than I’ve known my whole live. And not just from my sister-in-law — my sister married a Mormon boy. So, I feel like I came into the book with a little bit of information.

When Scott read the book, he thought it was about how Mormonism as a whole is a bad faith. That wasn’t the impression I got from it. The impression I got was that Krakauer was pointing out the bad in fundamentalism. And fundamentalism is bad in *any* religion. The Mormons are certainly not the first faithful to spill blood in the name of their god. I was a little disappointed that the book didn’t really address today’s mainstream Mormonism at all, which is an entirely different animal. I felt he was a little disingenuous by leaving that out, because most people are going to read the book and come out with the equation “Mormons = EVIL!!”, which really is not true. Not unless “Catholics = EVIL!!” because the Crusades happened x number of years ago, or “Protestents = EVIL!!” because they burned a bunch of women they thought were witches x number of years ago.

I may or may not be able to squeeze book #76 in before the end of the year. I’m also not home yet, so I’ll post my Christmas recap later in the week!

Book count: 75
Pages in book: 372
Page count: 27,359

15,000 page goal reached 6/14/05!
50 book goal reached 7/19/05!