A Reader’s Library

Review by Kristine Hansen The rationale for this reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon is one that I can applaud. In the words of editor Grant Hardy, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, the Book of Mormon is “one of the world’s most influential religious texts” and therefore “worthy of serious study” (vii). However, as Hardy notes, it may often be ignored, particularly by those outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, simply because it is difficult to read. Its length, complexity, and sometimes archaic language are one obstacle, but Hardy believes its formatting in columns broken into chapters and verses is another. Also, the 1981 edition of the Book of Mormon includes numerous footnotes that cross-reference doctrinal concepts with related passages in the other standard works of the church. This visually daunting format, Hardy believes, may militate against readers’ grasping the overall narrative as well as hinder their understanding of the complex intertextuality of the book, composed as it is of various ancient records compiled, abridged, and edited by Mormon and then translated by Joseph Smith. So to help readers find the text more accessible and readable, Hardy has taken from the public domain the 1920 edition of the Book of Mormon and reformatted it “in accordance with the editorial style of most modern editions of the Bible” (vii). In place of the 1920 edition’s footnotes, he has written footnotes of his own and added several appendices, all of which aim to help the novice reader become familiar with the provenance, stemma, authors, translation, language, and internal consistency of the text. All in all, I find the results praiseworthy and believe this edition of the Book of Mormon will become a useful tool for scholars, teachers, students, and parents. The reformatting of the text has several noticeable features. First, Hardy presents the text in paragraphs and, where he deems appropriate, in poetic stanzas. The text still has the chapter numbers, which are set in a large stylized font, and verse numbers, which are very small superscripts, usually—but not always—at the beginning of a sentence. Occasionally, a verse is divided so that the first part belongs to one paragraph and the second part to the next. The text still includes the headnotes that preface some of the books in the Book of Mormon, but it leaves out the chapter summaries that are a feature of the 1981 edition. Instead, Hardy has added headings of his own throughout the chapters to help the reader follow the narrative or grasp the points made in a sermon. For example, 1 Nephi 1 has these headings: “Lehi’s Visions and Call” and “Lehi Prophesies to the Jews.” And Alma 5, entitled “Alma’s Sermon at Zarahemla,” has headA R E A DE R’ S L I BR A RY Kristine Hansen and Keith Lawrence 100 VOLUME 12, NUMBER 2, 2003 Grant Hardy, ed. The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xviii + 710 pp. Hardback, $39.95 ings that indicate main topics of the sermon, such as “Imagine the Judgment Day” and “Repent and Prepare.” I found the headings in Jacob 5, Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree, particularly helpful, as they indicate the various transplants, decayings, and remedies attempted to save the olive tree. The poetic passages are the most striking feature as one thumbs through the book. Not only are long passages, such as the chapters from Isaiah, set as poetry, but short passages as brief as two lines are similarly reformatted whenever there is a form of parallelism that has been noted in the Hebrew Bible. So, for example, Alma 5:40 looks like this: For I say unto you that: Whatsoever is good cometh