Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #314879 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-27
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

An excellent easily-readable scholarly publication
Novak's work was a long time in the writing, but it was worth the wait. A very well-researched and well-written book, giving both the history of the people and the communities they left behind for their journey west.

I was impressed by the detailed research into their backgrounds and relationships.

A book like this could have easily become a dense tome of numbers, a work that was a struggle to read. But Shannon Novak has penned a very readable work accessible to a wide audience, while still presenting her data and ample footnotes; the bibiography alone is a useful tool for historians of the western trails, the Mountain Meadows Massacre or Mormon history.

I just ordered a copy to keep in my personal library...

Not just be lost in the sands of time as simply a one of a number.
It is so often sadly the case when so many die at the same time, the impact of each individual death becomes less and less, until it becomes nothing more than padding for statistics, completely stripped of its human element. "House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre" seeks to remedy this horrifying effect by turning a more personal look at the victims of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre, where 120 men, women, and children were senselessly executed by Mormon militiamen. Going over each individual, and using whatever evidence she could, author and professor of Anthropology Shannon Novak does her best to give each of the hundred twenty unfortunate souls justice to not just be lost in the sands of time as simply a one of a number. "House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre" is a highly recommended addition to academic and community library Anthropology, American History, and Utah History reference shelves and supplemental reading lists.

Bones of the Mountain Meadows Massacre
"House of Mourning", stands alone among all other literature previously published about the tragedy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Shannon A. Novak, an anthropologist with impeccable credentials, allows the bones of the Arkansas victims to speak for themselves. This book makes no attempt to assign blame or identify motive for the murders but brings together information from oral interviews, primary record sources and other works on the MMM with the analysis of victims' skeletal remains. Novak's work gives a clearer picture of the victims and their lifestyle in the Arkansas Ozarks. The reader meets the interconnected families through Federal Census reports and family records and hears the victims' voices through the medium of scientific data. One can almost see their faces as they set forth for a new life in California, only to meet a horrible death in a formerly peaceful meadow in Southern Utah.

After studying this event for more than twenty-five years, it is exciting to find a work that focuses on the victims and exactly who they were.