This book is a wet dream for wiseass, arrogant agnostics like myself. It's ostensibly about (a) the history of Mormonism; and (b) the brutal murder of a mother and her 2-year-old daughter by a couple of Mormon Fundamentalists who strayed way too far from the flock in the early 1980's. However, the deeper subject is the uneasy coexistence of faith and reason, and how the two have trampled each other throughout history. Without reading this book, you're probably aware that Mormonism is one of the kookiest religions out there. Magic reading glasses and peepstones, plural marriage, historical anachronisms in the Book of Mormon, church-sanctioned racism and homophobia, the questionable morals of the religion's founding fathers...it's all laid out very well by Krakauer. But he also gives Mormonism the respect it deserves as the world's fastest-growing religion, and rightfully so. After all, just because the big JC didn't walk the earth in the time of printing presses, who's to say it's any quirkier than the oldest religions (or Scientology, for that matter), or that the founding fathers of the thousands of religions that have popped up throughout the ages were any more god-like. The bottom line is faith: you either have it or you don't, and sorry, we're never going to know who’s right until we drop dead (and btw, if the wiseass atheists and agnostics are right, what fun would that be? How can we brag about it if it all just goes poof? DAMN YOU, COLLEGE EDUCATION/DISCOVERY CHANNEL!!! JESUS SAVES!!!). Faith and reason do not coexist. But, as the murder story demonstrates, sometimes they have to form an uneasy truce in figuring out when "faith" devolves into "crime" or "insanity." Not as easy a task as you'd think.

Man, look at that review: I'm so ostensibly cool! Who said that English major was worthless?