Within the American academy, neglect of the most widely distributed book ever produced by an American is slowly giving way to notice. Nathan Hatch complained a generation ago that, “for all the attention given to the study of Mormonism, surprisingly little has been devoted to the Book of Mormon itself. . . . The pivotal document of the Mormon church, ‘an extraordinary work of popular imagination,’ still receives scant attention from cultural historians” (The Democratization of American Christianity [New Haven: Yale University, 1989], 115). The publication of this scripture as a Penguin Classic in 2008 signaled an important milestone in the road to legitimacy of a sort. After all, the series imprint has, according to its website, a well-deserved reputation as “the leading publisher of classic literature,” providing scholarly editions of “the best works from around the world, throughout history.” But the accommodation, like all compromises, represented an acceptance of a particular kind. It is “an important historical document,” explains the Penguin editor. “Not everyone may believe its contents,” writes Paul Gutjahr in a similar vein, “but fewer and fewer can continue to doubt the importance the book holds in American history and culture” (195). Given the curt and often rabid dismissals of the book for most of the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth, such willingness on the part of academics like Gutjahr to engage the Book of Mormon represents progress. Careful observers, however, will note the absence of “American religion” in the contexts referred to above, as an area in which the record is considered to have a meaningful presence. Paul Gutjahr's splendid “biography” of the Book of Mormon adds another chapter to the American academy's reception history of the Book of Mormon—but it too categorizes the volume within careful parameters. “It is increasingly hard to argue against the growing scholarly consensus that ‘the Book of Mormon should rank among the great achievements of American literature,’” he writes, seconding the opinion of Daniel Walker Howe (9).

The implicit caveats are doubtless the product of the difficulties thought to arise from other considerations—such as a religious one—of the Book's status. The book's unambiguous account of its own construction, as well as the historically defined reciprocity between Joseph Smith's own moral authority as a religious leader and the sacred status of a book inseparably wedded to his claims and career, admit of no simple divorce. Given the fact that the scripture's status as an ancient document and its status as divine word are so inextricably connected, the willingness to bracket questions of the Book of Mormon's claims to ancient provenance is a reasonable expedient in the academic world, where religious texts are rightly studied in isolation from the religious claims they make upon readers.

In this light, Gutjahr navigates the terrain skillfully and at times with both refreshing originality and detail. He provides an accurate account of the Book's origins amid the religious fervor of New York's early nineteenth-century “burned over district.” He adroitly narrates the forces that arose in opposition to the iconoclastic scripture, and situates its early reception against the backdrop of early Mormonism's rise. But in addition, he devotes attention to lesser known dimensions of the Book's cultural reverberations and print history. We learn why translation and typographical challenges required more than a dozen years for its translation into Urdu, involving hand-drawn fonts for a twenty thousand character set. We discover that a filmic version of the Book of Mormon, intended to rival Ben-Hur, premiered in Utah in 1931. But even a Mormon Tabernacle Choir soundtrack could not legitimize for Mormon test audiences its salacious images of the scantily clad Isobel (Theo Pennington), and Corianton: A Story of Unholy Love, never found general distribution.

Gutjahr's study of the Book of Mormon is accurate, fair-minded, and well written. If his book has a shortcoming, it is one shared by academic treatments of the Book of Mormon generally. Jan Shipps first noticed the oversight decades ago. She wrote, “the tale of an unsophisticated farm boy who found some engraved metal plates and used ‘magic spectacles’ to translate therefrom a thousand years of pre-Columbian American history appears so incredible to many non-Mormons that they simply dismiss the prophet's visions as hallucinations, regard his ‘golden bible’ as a worthless document, and wonder how any intelligent person could ever accept it as true” (“The Mormons: Looking Forward and Outward,” in Where the Spirit Leads: American Denominations Today, ed. Martin Marty [Richmond, Va.: John Knox, 1980], 29–30). At an eastern university ten years ago, a prominent scholar of religion showed a comparable, and profoundly lamentable, rationalistic presentism. He asked a lecturer on the Book of Mormon how, given the supernaturalism in which the Book of Mormon story is immersed, he could get his students to take the record seriously. One positive development in recent religious studies has been a move toward what Marie Griffith calls “critical empathy.” “The lived worlds of human experience,” she reminds us, “are not identical to people's descriptions of these worlds” (God's Daughters [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], 12). The Book of Mormon, and its persuasive appeal to millions past and present, is a continuing sign of the gap yet to be closed between historical description and historical understanding.