Understanding The Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide Manual Grant Hardy LDS_____________________________________Understanding the Book of Mormon : A Reader's Guideby Grant R. HardyPublished by Oxford University Press, Inc (2010)Condition:Excellent++ condition 1st Edition Hardcover Book! The binding is tight and all 346 pages within are bright white with NO WRITING, UNDERLINING, HIGH-LIGHTING, RIPS, TEARS, BENDS OR FOLDS with the exception of a missing blank first page which for some reason was very carefully cut out, and a small stamp on the title page. The covers look near perfect! The dust jacket is in excellent condition, as can be seen in my photos. You will be happy with this one! Always handled carefully and packaged securely! Buy with confidence from a seller who takes the time to show you the details and not use just stock photos. Please check out all my pictures and email with any questions! Thanks for looking!About the Book:Mark Twain once derided the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print." Long and complicated, written in the language of the King James version of the Bible, it boggles the minds of many. Yet it is unquestionably one of the most influential books ever written. With over 140 million copies in print, it is a central text of one of the largest and fastest-growing faiths in the world. And, Grant Hardy shows, it's far from the coma-inducing doorstop caricatured by Twain.In Understanding the Book of Mormon, Hardy offers the first comprehensive analysis of the work's narrative structure in its 180 year history. Unlike virtually all other recent world scriptures, the Book of Mormon presents itself as an integrated narrative rather than a series of doctrinal expositions, moral injunctions, or devotional hymns. Hardy takes readers through its characters, events, and ideas, as he explores the story and its messages. He identifies the book's literary techniques, such as characterization, embedded documents, allusions, and parallel narratives. Whether Joseph Smith is regarded as author or translator, it's noteworthy that he never speaks in his own voice; rather, he mediates nearly everything through the narrators Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. Hardy shows how each has a distinctive voice, and all are woven into an integral whole.As with any scripture, the contending views of the Book of Mormon can seem irreconcilable. For believers, it is an actual historical document, transmitted from ancient America. For nonbelievers, it is the work of a nineteenth-century farmer from upstate New York. Hardy transcends this intractable conflict by offering a literary approach, one appropriate to both history and fiction. Regardless of whether readers are interested in American history, literature, comparative religion, or even salvation, he writes, the book can best be read if we examine the text on its own terms.Some Book Reviews:Russell Fox rated it & it was amazing!I've had this book on my shelf for something like 10 years, and I've only finally gotten around to reading it. For a faithful member of the Mormon community, or at least anyone who chooses to give the primary distinctive scripture used within the Mormon church, I can't recommend this book more highly. I've known all my life, as someone who was raised with readings of the Book of Mormon, that the book on its own terms is to be understood as the product of a set of ancient American prophet-editors who were compiling records for a latter-day audience. Hardy uses the tools of literary analysis to discover, assuming what the book itself presents on its own terms, what we can really know about those prophet-editors (Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni), and what their choices in regards to embedding other documents, making use of allusion and parallels, and much more can tell us about the world they were describing. The result, particularly the first two-thirds of the book (for a variety of reasons, trying to pull any kind of internally consistent understanding of Moroni's portion of the overall book strikes me as much harder sell), is incredibly eye-opening, or at least it was to me. In fact, I found parts of it downright faith-promoting, which is not something I expected from the book at all. Anyway, an important book for Mormons; hopefully, somehow or another, its critical take on the Book of Mormon will filter down to the ordinary faithful, one way or another.Corey Wozniak rated it & it was amazing!I've been a sloppy reader of scripture. Grant Hardy taught me how I should have been reading the BOM this whole time. He reads between the lines, against the grain, and just pays good attention, and his hard work is richly rewarded. Here's a handful of random insights to serve as teasers from the first 1/4-or-so of the book:1) Laman and Lemuel can be read much more sympathetically. In fact, in some senses they may have been more "orthodox" in their Jewish faith than Lehi or Nephi.2) Lehi and Nephi, even though they saw the same vision of the Tree of Life, interpreted that vision very differently.3) Nephi may have had some disagreements with Lehi on a number of matters, including Nephi's disposal of Laban.4)Nephi was most likely son-less, and may have experienced marital strife.5) How the BOM deals with the old archetype of knowledge vs. happiness.6) Many more gems.This book will forever change the way I read scripture (i.e. it will prevent me from reading it lazily.)Jeff Gasser rated it & it was amazing!I can't recommend this book enough. It took me over a year to inch my way through it sporadically while reading alongside the Book of Mormon itself. It's dense and at times beyond my reading comprehension. So it's not for everyone. You could be forgiven for reading a few particularly enlightening chapters and skipping some of the minutiae that is necessary to fully flush out the author's arguments. And one more disclaimer - Hardy does appear to reach at times in his conclusions, even as his findings and insights are almost always impressive. This is inevitable for a literary interpretation of any text, especially one that makes claims that it is historically accurate.All that said. After reading this book I feel like my view of the Book of Mormon exists on an entirely new plane of understanding. Drudging through Hardy's painstaking detail about each of the three major narrators of the Book of Mormon will fundamentally change the way you read it. I believe that anyone who is serious about studying the message of the Book of Mormon on a deeper level should read this book. I now hold a greater respect for and fascination with the complexity and depth that the Book of Mormon has. And I must say, while Hardy does not take a position on whether the Book of Mormon's claims about its historicity are true - as a member of the LDS church who has a vested interest in these claims, I must say this book made it much easier for me to believe that the Book of Mormon was written by ancient American prophets. So at the very least if that sort of insight is interesting to you, definitely try picking this book up.Copyright © 2018-2024 TDM Inc. The photos and text in this listing are copyrighted. I spend lots of time writing up my descriptions and despise it when un-original losers cut and paste my descriptions in as their own. It is against ebay policy and if you are caught, you will be reported to ebay and could be sued for copyright infringement and damages.
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