Product Description

The first paperback edition of the classic biography of the founder of the Mormon church, this book attempts to answer the questions that continue to surround Joseph Smith. Was he a genuine prophet, or a gifted fabulist who became enthralled by the products of his imagination and ended up being martyred for them? 24 pages of photos. Map.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14362 in Books
• Published on: 1995-08-01
• Released on: 1995-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Inside Flap Copy
The first paperback edition of the classic biography of the founder of the Mormon church, this book attempts to answer the questions that continue to surround Joseph Smith. Was he a genuine prophet, or a gifted fabulist who became enthralled by the products of his imagination and ended up being martyred for them? 24 pages of photos. Map.

Customer Reviews

Well, I'm number 160
159 Amazon reviewers have come before me to say what they think about this book by Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith.

Before I read this book, I knew nothing about Joseph Smith and only a little more about Fawn Brodie, as I was once a graduate student studying American history.

After reading this book, I am sure of one thing: Joseph Smith was a truly American prophet who created an exceptionally American religion.

Joseph Smith was a con-man, a prophet with an exceptional vision of God and an even more amazing liturgical, ceremonial and organizational implementation, and - let's not forget - a martyr. He also loved life. He loved women. He was not a conventional prophet.

Brody's book will take you through all this. I believe the journey was as long for her as for Smith. Read the Epilogue. This sums up her understanding of the man and his fantasy - how the fantasy evolved and how it was absorbed into his life and became a reality.

An amazing book about an amazing man. What American in 19th-Century started something that had so great an impact on our country and the world, other than perhaps Lincoln?

That's it. I'm not a Mormon, either.

No Ma'am, That Ain't History!
The so-called facts in this book have been debunked by Hugh Nibley's book, "No Ma'am, That Ain't History."

No Man Knows My History
No Man Knows My History was a direct attack on critical Mormon beliefs about Joseph Smith. In 1946, The Improvement Era, the official periodical of the Church, said that many of the book's citations arose from doubtful sources and that the biography was "of no interest to Latter-day Saints who have correct knowledge of the history of Joseph Smith." The "Church News" section of the Deseret News provided a lengthy critique that acknowledged the biography's "fine literary style" and then denounced it as "a composite of all anti-Mormon books that have gone before."

BYU professor and LDS historian and apologist Hugh Nibley challenged Brodie in another booklet, No, Ma'am, That's Not History, asserting that Brodie had cited sources supportive only of her conclusions while conveniently ignoring others. Brodie herself thought the Deseret News pamphlet "a well-written, clever piece of Mormon propaganda", but she dismissed the ultimately more popular No, Ma'am, That's Not History as "a flippant and shallow piece."

Brodie's controversial depiction of Joseph Smith is in the same vein as her other Psychoanalysis works of fiction. I say fiction because the psychoanalytical babbling of the insane is just that - psychoanalytical babbling without substance or fact. Brodie incorporates in her work Freudian psychology. Psychoanalysis is a work of the devil for sure, based on dreams and unprovable and unsupported assumptions. Her psycho biography of Thomas Jefferson became a best-seller base on the same psychoanalytical babbling And most important, Brodie's study of the early Richard Nixon, completed while she was dying of cancer, demonstrated the hazards of psycho biography in the hands of an author who loathed her subject. Brodie grew up disliking the LDS religion with full support from her mother. Brodie had access to church historical records because of her family connections to the church. She deviously betrayed the trust of church historians by misusing and misrepresenting the material.

Psychoanalysis is a body of knowledge developed by Sigmund Freud and his followers, devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behavior. Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a specific type of treatment in which the patient verbalizes thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst formulates the unconscious conflicts causing the patient's symptoms and character problems, and interprets them for the patient to create insight for resolution of the problems.

Both Fawn Brodie and her husband subjected themselves to psychoanalysis, he for insomnia and she for chronic mild depression and sexual problems. (Bernard's employer, the RAND Corporation, paid most of the bills.) If the problems of everyday life had been insufficient to maintain Brodie's interest in psychology, there was the case of her mother, who during this period attempted suicide three times, the second by cutting herself with a Catholic crucifix and the third (which succeeded) by setting herself on fire.

One should be careful what they read and adopt as gospel truth. The infamous Mark Hofmann read Brodie's No Man Knows My History before he bombed and kill two prominent Salt Lake City residents in 1985. Hofmann set out to destroy the LDS church. Hofmann's favorite text to discredit the Mormon church was Fawn's Brodie's No Man Knows My History. In my opinion Brodie's book is a work of the devil for sure, based on the psychoanalytical babbling of the insane.