Reviewed by Tabitha Thompson

In nonfiction, trust in the author is vital to the success of the book. But in Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, the first misleading statement is found on the dust-jacket: that the book is about a pair of murders by the Lafferty brothers. While the book does include this story, it fills relatively few chapters.

The book’s purpose is to use Ron and Dan Lafferty—two wayward, drug-addicted, excommunicated ex-Mormons who turn to polygamy and then murder—to frame the telling of a skewed portrayal of the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS or “Mormon”) and torrid tales of modern polygamists who belong to other churches. Krakauer is a talented writer, but his eloquent phrasing comes too often at the expense of truth.

His research is so poor that those even marginally familiar with the LDS Church’s tenets will notice obvious misinformation which runs from the minor (the claim that Pioneer Day— essentially Utah’s founding day holiday—is the Mormons’ most important holiday) to the historic and even doctrinal.

Notably, the author paints the LDS Church and the polygamist churches of the United Effort Plan and Apostolic United Brethren with the same large brush, propagating the misleading term “Mormon Fundamentalist” in reference to the polygamist church followers. The separation of the people who founded the polygamist churches from the Mormons occurred more than 110 years ago, and the differences between their practices and beliefs have had a century to diverge into radically dissimilar entities.

Krakauer portrays LDS history in a negative light even when, he admits, his own unfounded conclusions stand in stark contrast to the those of notable historians whose “numbers are legion.” This he does when the truth doesn’t fulfill his crafting of a story of violent faith.

There is truth in Under the Banner of Heaven, but so much of it is filled with unfounded claims, errors, and misnomers that it shouldn’t be listed as non-fiction. If you have even a modicum of understanding of the LDS church, reading Krakauer’s book is torture; if you don’t, you’ll be so misinformed as to make it a waste of time.