Sanders does a wonderful job articulating the reasoning behind many current debates about language, education, literacy, and the shifting definition of written communication. I highly recommend this book, along with Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet versus the Goddess (which offers an alternative view) as food for thought to anyone who teaches, designs, communicates...

Here's another cultural critic (among a few but growing number) who calls our fascination with electronic media into question. Barry Sanders argues that literacy is on the decline, in large measure because of our fixation on electronically created sources of "knowledge" -- tv, computer games, videos, software. The problem is, these much-heralded technological breakthroughs fail to give us a coherent sense of our own "voice." Sanders believes that the narrative power of true literary sources (stories, myths,and BOOKS, DAMMIT!) provides us with a necessary framework for interpreting our own pains and frustrations, and connects us to others in meaningful ways. In a culture where more and more of the young prefer to be amused by passively responding to electronic images, these same persons find their angst disconnected from the context of shared humanity. No wonder then, that we read about senseless killings where child-perpetrators feel no remorse for their victims. No acquired voice, no humanity ... so they violently lash out when meaninglessness becomes unbearable. Read this book and then engage in subterfuge acts -- like joining book discussion groups, reading aloud to kids, writing journals, and otherwise declining to allow electronic gadgets to do your "thinking" for you. Radical? In these times, you bet

Yes, buy and read this book. You can see from the reviews that it is controversial. Reading controversial literature generally makes people more well rounded.

The controversy doesn't revolve around the merits of the book. Any book that touches a religious theme has the same source of antagonism. A large number of people reading the history of Joseph Smith are doing so to ask the question: Was Smith truly the divine relevator of God or was he a charlatan?

Such controversies are always mysteries.

Accurate historical and scientific research has a wreckless history of messing with beliefs based on revelation. Look at the job that Copernicus did on the Catholic Church with his little diagrams suggesting the earth was round.

Ms. Brodie was a faithful member of the LDS Church who changed her mind on this issue while doing her historical research. Yes, she is an apostate. She brings to the surface many of the facts that led to her conclusions.

Of course, it should be noted that she is researching in a field where others have done twisting of facts to cast Smith as a living saint.

Over all, it appears to be an extremely well researched work in a field where all of the research is questionable in nature. If you are interested in LDS or Utah history, I would strongly recommend the book.

If your are wanting to read the accepted version of Joseph Smith's life, I would recommend reading The Work and The Glory by Gerald Lund.

If you enjoy learning, I would pick up Brodie's book, it is far more interesting.

A well-researched and documented book. Ms. Brodie did much of her research in the Mormon Church's archives and library, and because David O McKay (a former president of the Mormon Church) was her uncle, she had access to documents that other researchers did not. This biography portrays Joseph Smith (the founder of Mormonism) as a fraud, a con-man, and a seducer of women. For instance, Brodie documents how Joseph Smith defrauded his church members in the Kirtland Anti-Banking scandal, swindling them of their money and their land. Brodie also documents how he sent various men on church missions and seduced their wives while they were away. These are just two examples of frauds Smith perpetrated. The book is controversial because many Mormons feel that the book is an attack on their church founder, and they claim that it is bad history. Ms. Brodie attempted to enter the mind of her subject and explain what motivated Joseph Smith, in this regard she crosses the line between history and psycho-analysis. An excellent read.

I've consummed a library of books on Mormon studies, and had held off on reading "No Man Knows My History" because I had already read a considerable quantity of biographical material on Joseph Smith. I capitulated at last only because it is among the most well known books on early Mormon history. I am so glad I did. No book could have pulled it all together and made sense of it all as well as Fawn Brodie's book. It is as valuable today as it was when it was first written over half a century ago. None of the objective scholarship of recent years contradicts her conclusions, but rather validates her, page after page after page. Her insight is piercing, her style is almost poetic, and her message is powerful.

It is not any easy book for a Mormon to read, as is evidenced by some of the reactionary attacks Brodie receives in some of the reviews already written. The faithful do not want to hear that Joseph Smith was an "evolutionary revolutionary," his doctrine growing with his ego and sense of personal magnificence. But this is no mean swipe at the character of Joseph Smith...if anything, you come away with a sense of awe at the creative genius, the charismatic giant that he must have been. If he brought scorn and violence upon himself and his people, it was a measure of the power he produced and the fear that he struck in lesser men with whom he shared his time and space. Nevertheless, Brodie's exploration of the world of Joseph Smith and the context within which his doctrine evolved is brilliant. She is adept at recognizing the role that projection has played throughout his career, beginning with the Book of Mormon, and continuing on through all of his other writings, including the History of the Church. Ms. Brodie says it best herself in the opening lines of Chapter 19: "A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become." Or as is so often the case, "less what a man was than what he wished he had become." To one who has studied the role of paradigms in shaping the way we interpret our world, Brodie's book makes the most beautiful sense. To one who's faith is at stake, however, her book may serve to threaten the idylic, heroic legend of Joseph Smith that has been carefully nurtured since his murder in 1844.

This is among the finest pieces of historical literature I have had the priveledge of reading. Her scholarship and writing and fearless approach to tackle controversial issues with objectivity and sensitivity is matched only by Juanita Brooks in the realm of Mormon studies. This is a book not just to read, but to consume.

It is hard to know what to say about this book. The first fify pages were the most invigorating I have read in a long time, full of interesting characters and observations as well as tremendous wit. I could hardly wait to read on, but as I did, I began to grow disappointed and eventually ran out of enthusiasm. I plodded to the end but it was heavy going. The novel-within-a-novel concept can work under certain circumstances but this is not one of them. The excerpt from the character Garcia's novel added nothing and were an irritating distraction from the main event. Alfau would have benefitted from having a good editor. All in all, an idea with enormous potential that starts off brilliantly but fades all too quickly.

There are so many interesting things to say about Felipe Alfau and his novel, "Chromos," that it is difficult to decide where to begin. There is the novel itself, of course, a complex and sometimes difficult post-modernist narrative written years before the appearance of the so-called post-modernists (Alfau was, in other words, ahead of his time). There is the history of the novel's publication, a fascinating tale in its own right. There is the fact that Alfau, a Spaniard who came to the United States at the age of fourteen, wrote "Chromos" and his earlier novel, "Locos," in English, rather than his native Spanish. And there is, finally, the biography and the views of the author himself-the former enigmatic, almost mysterious, in its obscurity; the latter disturbingly reactionary, reminiscent of Ezra Pound and forcing the reader to separate the man from his work.

"Chromos" is a series of narratives within narratives of a coterie of Spanish immigrants living in New York City sometime between the two World Wars. Among the main characters is Don Pedro Guzman O'Moor Algoracid, also known as Peter Guz and the Moor, and his close friend, Dr. Jose de los Rios, whom the Moor calls Dr. Jesuscristo. It is the Moor who first tells the novel's unidentified first person narrator to write the story of Spaniards living in New York, of the "Americaniards" as he calls them:

"You should write a book about the Americaniards, somebody should-but you have not written for a long time-anyway you could not write any more about your people in Spain-have been too long away, forgotten too much-don't know what it's all about and you could not write about Americans-don't know enough-impossible ever to understand another people. I could not understand them when I first came and every day I understand them less. We meet, we talk, but neither knows what it's all about-total confusion. My English was abominable when I arrived and everyday I speak it worse-impossible; can't understand a damn thing."

It is this request that frames the narrative, the Moor mysteriously taking the reluctant narrator to an old, dark, cockroach-infested basement apartment devoid of furniture (except for a book-filled bookcase), its walls covered by chromos-chromolithographs-"depicting people and scenes that came to life, but more like things remembered or imagined."

From this place, the unidentified narrator of "Chromos" relates his close relationship with the writer Garcia. It is Garcia who provides two narratives within the larger framing story, reading aloud to the narrator from two different works-one the seemingly "corny" and salacious multi-generational saga of the rise and decline of the Sandoval family in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain, the other the cinematic narrative of a Spaniard named Ramos who, in a Mephistophelian bargain, is given the ability to skip through time and emigrates to America in the early twentieth century. All the time, while Garcia narrates the stories contained in his two novels, the larger narrative of "Chromos" provides a first-person account of the day-to-day life of the Moor, Dr. de los Rios, Garcia, and the narrator. And the narrator, too, provides another narration as he sees into the mind-sees the imagination and dreams-of the seemingly forlorn, hapless character Fulano. Indeed, one of the most powerful narrative sequences of "Chromos" occurs near the end, when the narrator details Fulano's sordid, obsessive, sexual and homicidal dreams of a female store mannequin.

"Chromos" is, in short, a complex novel that reminds the reader of the post-modern writings of Borges, Calvino, Coover, Pynchon, and others. It is, in this sense, a remarkable achievement since it was written in 1948, long before such fictions became prominent. And this leads us to the next part of the story, the fact that while "Chromos" was written in 1948, it was not published until 1990, when it was nominated for the National Book Award. For this, we have an editor of the Dalkey Archive to thank. As related in a 1990 article in Newsday, reprinted at the Dalkey Archive web site (http://www.centerforbookculture.org):

"In 1987, Steve Moore, [an editor at] a small publishing company, Dalkey Archive, found a copy of "Locos" [Alfau's 1936 novel] at a barn sale in Massachusetts. He paid $10 for it and after reading it, immediately found Mr. Alfau's number in the Manhattan phone book. Mr. Alfau, living alone in Chelsea, told them to publish the book if they wanted to; he didn't care what happened. When "Locos" did reasonably well, Mr. Alfau told them to use the money for somebody else's unpublished work. He had no use for money. Moore asked Mr. Alfau if he had written anything else. Mr. Alfau took "Chromos" out of the dresser where it had been since 1948."

While a native Spaniard and Spanish speaker, Alfau wrote in English and, for this reason, he has been compared to other writers who adopted another, non-native language for writing their fictions, writers like Conrad, Beckett, Nabokov, and Brodsky. Indeed, the first paragraph of "Chromos" adumbrates the theme not only of the immigrant living in a foreign country, but the way that immigrant experience is further occluded by language:

"The moment one learns English, complications set in. Try as one may, one cannot elude this conclusion, one must inevitably come back to it. This applies to all persons, including those born to the language and, at times, even more so to Latins, including Spaniards. It manifests itself in an awareness of implications and intricacies to which one had never given a thought; it afflicts one with that officiousness of philosophy which, having no business of its own, gets in everybody's way and, in the case of Latins, they lose that racial characteristic of taking things for granted and leaving them to their own devices without inquiring into causes, motives or ends, to meddle indiscreetly into reasons which are none of one's affair and to become not only self-conscious, but conscious of other things which never gave a damn for one's existence."

So what is a reader of "Chromos" to make of all this? If you believe Alfau himself, not too much. When asked in an interview about the sale of his first novel, "Locos," which departed drastically from the commercially accepted novels of the time, he replied: "I got $250 for 'Locos.' But you are right. In fact, I don't see how anybody could like my books or could even understand them. They are unreadable."

In that same interview, published in the Spring, 1993, edition of Review of Contemporary Fiction (and reprinted at the Dalkey Archive web site), Alfau-ninety years old at the time and demonstrating his reputation as iconoclastic, opinionated, curmudgeonly, and politically incorrect-is quoted as follows: "I think democracy is a disgrace. Machiavelli was absolutely right: the difference between tyranny and democracy is that in tyranny you need to serve only one master, whereas in a pluralistic society you have to obey many. I always thought Generalissimo Francisco Franco was a trustworthy ruler of Spain, and thus supported him. Since his death, the Iberian peninsula is in complete chaos. In fact, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, I championed Franco's cause in this country as much as I could."

While Alfau's politics and personality may seem anathema, "Chromos" is a remarkable work of literary imagination and narrative structure that should be read by anyone interested in modern and post-modern writing. While perhaps "unreadable," as Alfau says, by those looking for a traditional linear narrative with an unvarnished plot, "Chromos" is a joyride for those who like experimentation, complexity and intellectual pyrotechnics.

I'll post a longer review of this work when I have time here. I once wrote a glowing book review about this book 10 years ago. This is one of these rare finds by Dalkey Archive press, which (admittedly) publishes esoteric and hard-to-read fiction. Out of nowhere, it was nominated for the National Book Award in 1990 or so, propelling this old man to some fame and notoriety.

I remember Proust's metaphor in one of his books about one's literary works existing as separate creatures from the author, like little girls dancing around the death bed of a dying author. I think Alfau was interviewed as saying something like, I wrote this book decades ago. Why all of a sudden this attention?

I used to give this book as the answer to the question of "what is your favorite book" because no one has ever heard of it (though I imagine university readers at the writing program where I taught, Johns Hopkins, would be sympathetic to this writing). Actually, although parts of it are long-winded, in general the narrative is conventional and full of old-fashioned storytelling. The characters engage in multiple philosophical conversations about time,reality and a lot of other things. I would compare this to Dostoevksy (in terms of the philosophical plane it travels on, not the plot, which is rather lackadaisical). Although there certainly is a tinge of European postmodern fiction here, unlike the fiction of Barth, there are not narrative tricks that distract from the story at hand. The end kind of wanders, but how fun it was getting there. You read for the set pieces, not for the overall plot. For variety, check out his short stories in Locos: A Comedy of Gestures. They are priceless gems.

You have to be in the right frame of mind for philosophical digressions and plot that advances mainly through conversation, but if you are, you won't find it difficult to get into this book at all.

To be honest, I've never met another person who has actually read this book, and it would be interesting to read responses from others who have read this book.

I should point out that I am writing these impressions about 10 years after reading the book. I remember almost nothing, and yet I remember how I felt reading it and the impressions it left on me. Does this count as a legitimate review? It will be fun knowing that the book is there waiting to be picked up again.

Second-guessing history is always a dicey business, full of "what-ifs" and wild speculation. However, as Alperovitz makes clear, there were several viable options to ending the Pacific War that were both more humane and likely to succeed.

1. Demonstrate the Atom Bomb on an uninhabited atoll, as recommended in the Franck Report by a committee of scientists working on the Project

2. Make a small concession to Japanese pride/saving face and allow the Emperor to retain his throne in a total, but conditional, surrender (which they had already proposed)

3. Allow a few extra days for Japan to react to the entry of the Soviets into the war. It is now known that overtures to a settlement had been relayed to the British Foreign Minister.

Any one of these options would be more likely to succeed than a full-fledged armed invasion of the home islands, which had been proposed as a military disinformation but wasn't being seriously considered. As such, it backfired horribly by strengthening Japanese resolve.

Instead, the hawks and, for lack of a better term, "military-minded" advisors to new president Truman recommended a full use of the weapon. As a result, the United States is still the only nation on earth to have used Atomic weapons in war -- twice -- and against unarmed civilians. Not a very proud legacy.

Their reasoning, with the hindsight of fifty years, now seems sadly small-minded:

1. To justify the expenditure of $2 billion on a weapon originally designed in competition with the now-defeated Germany

2. To intimidate the Soviets into accepting American hegemony.

Experience bore out the Franck Report's prediction that the second goal was unattainable, and its further prediction that a ruinous nuclear arms race would result. The recommendations and predictions of some of the world's smartest people were thrown out by military advisors (specifically James Byrnes, who refused to even share the report with Truman), considering himself better equipped to understand human nature and thus shape history for all of mankind.

Whether "revisionist" or second-guessing, Alperovitz makes a compelling case for better options dismissed, and the tragic legacy of military hubris.

Of the many books that are on the subject of the atomic bomb, this one to date is the most insightful i have read. This book will make you think about the american situation at the end of WWII. Not only what is at stake, but the options to Truman at the time are covered. It might surprise you that the last thing that was on the american leaders' mind was an invasion on Japan minor scheduled for spring 1946. Fact is that they were close to surrender already and knew the end was near. The book will take you through hundreds of documents backing up what i just wrote. The actual dropping of the bomb is just history....why did we choose to drop it is the real question. These are the hardest questions to answer but need to be approached if we are to ever apply it in a world I feel is more unstable now than ever. The decision in 1946 affects us even today. Read this book.

Gar Alperovitz builds a strong case that the atomic bomb was not militarily necessary to end the war in the Pacific, but was used to advance American diplomatic and political interests in the post war period, especially with respect to the Soviet Union. In particular, the apparent reluctance of military leaders to use the bomb is most interesting.

Of equal interest is the implicit suggestion that the after-the-fact efforts to justify the bomb's use and mute public criticism began a fifty year pattern of government secrecy, deception, and propaganda which threatens the democratic process even to this day, and that the cold war was arguably triggered by U.S. efforts to make the Soviet Union more "manageable" during the summer of 1945.

Finally, I was impressed that the author was far less judgmental than he could have been. I expected a political diatribe when I started this book. Instead, I encountered a well researched objective analysis of original source material. Where evidence was missing, conflicting, or subject to varying interpretations, the author said so.