I have been meaning to read this for quite some time, as it is the first volume in the most recent official history of Community of Christ. I’m also looking forward to the next two volumes, since they cover history that I am not familiar with, but it was especially interesting to read a Community of Christ perspective on the 1830-1844 era.

I appreciated the frankness and openness of the volume—it’s impossible to imagine an LDS version of this book taking the same approach. As open as the Saints books are compared to previous takes on LDS history, they don’t compare to this. My only complain about the book is the sometimes-stilted writing and the seeming tangents—ti was sometimes hard to tell why particular subjects got the focus they did.