Rating: 
Summary: Opportunity missed ..
Review: The premise linking a forged Dickinson poem, forged Mormon documents, and the forger enticed me to read this book.
Parts of the book describing how forgeries are done and detected were very interesting. Alas however, there are no pictures of the forged documents that the author talks about. Thus you are left to your imagination when things such as "the second loop in the S" come up. Finally, I printed off samples of "The Oathe(sic) Of a Freeman", "Salamander Letter", and "Anthon Transcripts" from the web. Do this if you want to follow the descriptions in the book.
Often the author states "in pictures of Hoffman from the...". But NONE of these pictures are in the book. This took a lot away from the quality of the work. Behind the book there are two pictures of Dickenson poems, one forged and one real. That's it.
The writing is good in parts but somewhat disjointed as a flowing narrative.
There is nothing new in regards to the forger, Mark Hoffman, and his Mormon forgaries.
Rating:
Summary: Good attempt for first edition, first-time author
Review: Well, now how can this book have an average rating of four stars? Reviewers on Amazon.com are so laudatory of mediocre work.I read this book as part of my continuing interest in the "Mormon Related True Crime" Sub Genre. For the record, other books I have read in this area include: Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, The Prophet of Death by Jack Early and the Executioner's Tale by Norman Mailer. I've also recently read No Man Knows My History by Fawn Brodie(A biography of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, which is simply an essential read, as far as I'm concerned.
So, I'd recommend all of the books above, except for Prophet of Death, which is a tad intense for the general reading public. However, I would NOT recommend this book. First of all, the whole thing reads like the expanded New Yorker article that it is. I don't have a problem with the New Yorker, but an article should stay an article and a book should be a book. The story of Mark Hoffman is an interesting story (please read below reviews for more details). However, Worrall's inexplicable choice to bookend the story by focusing on a forged Emily Dickinson poem is just, well, inexplicable. I suppose the explanation is that Worrall learned about Hoffman through his coverage of the Dickinson forgery. This doesn't excuse the fact that Worrall skips through the Mormon forgeries that rocked Utah. His sourcing inside Utah is bad to the point where the reader can practically imagine the writer itching to finish his interviews. He includes a chapter on the "art of forgery" that is just useless. The editing in this book is sloppy. Forgery sounds like an interesting subject, but I didn't learn much about it from this book. True, perhaps I shouldn't have expected much, but the subtitle IS "A true story of literary crimne and the art of forgery". I note that there is another book about the same topic called "Salamander". Since that title refers to Hoffman's most famous Mormon forgery, I regret that I chose this book over that one. Oh well, I did manage to score a hardback version of this title for a buck fifty, so I guess nothing much is lost. And this book really is a fast read (maybe two and a half hours tops). Good as a piece of intellectual fluff, but don't expect The Poet and the Murderer to rock your world.
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