Reception
Jane Lampman, reviewing the book for the Christian Science Monitor, called the book a fascinating, definitive biography, saying it explored the controversy surrounding Smith without attempting to resolve it, and lauded the book as "an honest yet sympathetic portrayal...rich in its depiction of developing Mormonism.". Walter Kirn of the New York Times Book Review says that when reading Bushman's biography, "once the reader despairs of ever finding out whether Smith was God's own spokesman or the L. Ron Hubbard of his day, it's possible to enjoy a tale that's as colorful, suspenseful and unlikely as any in American history." Larry McMurtry says that in reading Bushman, it is difficult to determine "where biography ends and apologetics begins." In a long academic review, Jan Shipps calls the book "the crowning achievement of the new Mormon history," that is likely to "serve as the standard work on Mormonism's coming in to being" for the foreseeable future. Retired BYU professor Marvin S. Hill, writing in Dialogue, says that Bushman "comes up markedly short at times and he does not always examine controversial issues carefully" but that "his book suggests that thought about the Prophet has matured among some faithful Latter-day Saints."
In 2007, Bushman published a brief but revealing memoir about the publication of Rough Stone Rolling, which outlines both the genesis of the book and the reaction of audiences and reviewers during his yearlong book tour.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
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“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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