[Key Excerpts] On Joseph Smith's early years: "Joseph's world in the 1820s was one saturated with folk magic, treasure-seeking, and the use of seer stones. The line between the sacred and the magical was blurred, and the young Joseph moved easily between the two worlds. His family's involvement in money-digging and divination was not unusual for their time and place, but it provided the foundation upon which his later prophetic career was built." On the Book of Mormon's origins: "The Book of Mormon can best be explained, not by Joseph's ignorance nor by his delusions, but by his responsiveness to the provincial opinions of his time. He had a talent for borrowing and synthesizing. The theology of the book is a distillation of the religious controversies of the 1820s — anti-Masonry, the revivals, the debates over infant baptism, and the question of Indian origins." On the First Vision: "If something happened that spring morning in 1820, it passed totally unnoticed in Joseph's home town, and the boy did not write about it for at least twelve years. There is no reference to the first vision in any published material in the 1830s. The story first appeared in print in 1842." On polygamy: "Polygamy was not, as the church later insisted, a divine principle reluctantly adopted. It was an expression of Joseph's deepest impulses, rationalized and systematized into a theological framework. The secrecy surrounding it corrupted every relationship it touched." On her overall assessment: "One may wonder at the presumption of any woman who would attempt to write the biography of a man who said of himself, 'No man knows my history.' But the source materials are richer than Joseph himself perhaps realized, and they tell a story far more absorbing than the official church version."