Under the Banner of Heaven is a riveting read. The Lafferty boys were brought up in a squeaky clean All-American family. So what made two of them follow revelations from God to slit the throat of their ex-beauty queen sister-in-law and her infant daughter? The problem was that they got involved in the fundamentalist, survivalist wing of the Mormon Church.

Author Jon Krakauer expertly jumps from the immediate horror of the Lafferty boys to the context of Mormonism and the wider questions of religious violence. In the process we are taken on a house of horrors ride through the badlands of fundamentalist Mormon religion. Krakauer introduces us to red necks with more than 30 "wives"--many who were "married" in their early teens. It's a story of fraud, child abuse, incest, physical violence and spiritual and emotional rape at a deep level.

The contemporary story is lurid and shocking, but as Krakauer relates the picaresque story of Joseph Smith--the founder of the Mormon religion--you realise that present day fundamentalist Mormons are far closer to their founder in spirit and behaviour than the more squeaky clean manifestations of modern Mormonism. This well researched and tightly written account gives a great potted history of Mormonism and illuminates the psychotic fringes of religious mentality. In doing so it reveals the wild dangers of spiritual free wheeling and the need for caution and restraint in religion. --Dwight Longenecker

2008-09-30 Brilliant account of a religion and how it lead to a modern day murder

Brilliant account of a religion and how it lead to the murder of innocents by people carrying out what they thought was God's work. Sound familiar?

This is a stunning book. It so incredibly well researched and written that despite the amount of details you don't ever lose your way. It describes everything so richly that you almost feel part of events. A warning though - it makes the retelling of the actual murders all the more harrowing and almost unreadable at one point.

I'd like to think it's for everyone but I think you need more than a casual interest in religion (more so atheists! Anyone whose read God Delusion or Sam Harris MUST read this) to really enjoy a pretty full account of Mormon history but it really rewards. It made me shake my head in disbelief several times and reflect on how a religion (?!) like Mormonism or it's offshoots can gain such a foothold in modern times.

I'd also recommend it for fans of Brian Masters crime writing as it feels similarly well written and the subject matter does cross over.