Emma and Joseph: Their Divine Mission

Rating:
Summary: More to be learned about LDS and Joseph and Emma elsewhere.
Review: A basic history of the LDS Church as it particularly surrounds Joseph Smith. The author attempts to include Emma, but with little documentation the author bogs down the reader with overly cheerful assumptions about Emma's opinions or involvement's. "Surely Emma must have felt..." "One can fantasize that Emma..." Sadly the author avoids most difficult issues to the point of presenting a skewed history. As an LDS and a mild Church history enthusiast I found little in this book I hadn't found in other books and struggled to finish the book due to the warped presentation and overt avoidance of anything that presented Emma and Joseph in a negative light.

Rating:
Summary: Great book on the relationship between Emma and Joseph
Review: First of all, this book is not a history of the life of Joseph Smith. The book focuses more on Emma, thus the title "Emma and Joseph." The book is written by the great-great-grandaughter of Joseph and Emma (through their son Alexander Hale Smith). She writes as anyone else writing about their family would and as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (not RLDS). She discusses all the highlights and good times, while skirting around the contreversial issues. If you want to read a good book with many facts concerning the relationship between Emma, Joseph and the beginings of Mormonism, this is a good book. If you want all the details dealing with the contreversial aspects of early Mormonism, read something else. Give this book a try , you will enjoy it and you will learn something new about Emma and Joseph Smith.

Rating:
Summary: Very biased and incomplete presentation
Review: This book attempts to deify Joseph Smith, by glossing over the negatives and even leaving out major portions of his life. In particular, the book not only ignores polygamy, but actually pretends it doesn't even exist, even though it was a major part of the last decade of Joseph Smith's life, and factored heavily into his death. The book even discusses some of the women married to Joseph Smith without ever once mentioning those marriages.

To give the author the benefit of doubt, though, she comes from the RLDS church which maintained from its very beginnings that Joseph Smith never practiced polygamy. Still, given that it has been clearly documented repeatedly over the last 150 years, it is an incredible failing on the part of the author to not address this major aspect of Joseph and Emma's lives.