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ive pub'd this 'cos - per notability guideline @ wp:AUTHOR - believe enuf reviews cites now avail (full disclosure: didnt get enuf support w/in 2 discussions at articles for deletion for its inclusion in WP prev; apologize if instead was spos'd to bring to deletion review (if so will do) /thanks! --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 11:55, 22 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Park’s book is a compelling history, built from contemporaneous accounts and from the previously unreleased minutes of the Council of Fifty. . . . Park’s explication of them elevates Kingdom of Nauvoo from pure religious history to the realm of political theory. Park, an ambidextrous thinker, is equally sensitive to the danger the state can pose to religious minorities and to the danger that a religious institution can pose to the secular state. In his account, the early Mormons were a rowdy band of neo-Puritans who mounted a fundamental challenge to the democratic experiment. The tensions that they experienced―between the right to religious freedom and the limits of religious tolerance―still persist today." -- Casey Cep, The New Yorker--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:14, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Vigorous study of the early Mormon settlement in Illinois, linking its founding to a rising anti-democratic tradition... A welcome contribution to American religious and political history." -- Kirkus Reviews
"[An] enjoyable and fastidiously researched work.... Park, who was given extensive access to the Mormon Church's archives, entertainingly establishes this little-known Mormon settlement's proper place within the formative years of the Illinois and Missouri frontier." -- Publishers Weekly
"[Park] fashions a dense, exciting, and absorbing narrative of the most consequential and dramatic movement to dissent against and secede from the Constitutional republic before the Civil War." -- Ray Olson, Booklist [starred review]
"Benjamin E. Park creates a startling picture of Nauvoo, the church, and the nation that all historians of the period will have to grapple with." -- Richard Bushman, professor emeritus of history, Columbia University, and author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
"Kingdom of Nauvoo is a fascinating account of Joseph Smith's attempt to build a 'beautiful city' for adherents to the new religion he founded: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Benjamin E. Park's meticulously researched and gracefully written work provides a rich picture, not only of early Mormonism, but of the Jacksonian era in which the movement was born." -- Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
"Benjamin E. Park's Kingdom of Nauvoo tells the story of the city the Mormons built in Illinois before crossing the plains to Utah. Making sound use of newly available documents, Park's story exemplifies the new Mormon history at its best. The author demonstrates the importance of women-including the prophet's first wife, Emma Smith-in the shaping of Mormon history." -- Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 19:18, 18 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Park’s concise and engaging narrative of this Mormon 'empire' situates it firmly in the context of American political and social development, western expansion, and religious foment, in the process revealing the ways in which the early Church of Jesus Christ was shaped by the forces transforming the nation while also posing a challenge to America’s emerging democratic and capitalist order." -- Amy S. Greenberg, author of A Wicked War--Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:14, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
".. both the Mormon and historical contexts go together in a C.S.-Lewis-which-shear-is-more-essential-in-scissors way for the story, and Park has the skills and sheer expertise to accomplish the task .." -- Jack Waters, Amazon review[7]
".. With unprecedented access to the Mormon Church’s archives and guided by deep knowledge of its history, Park explains how Smith’s aspirations as a presidential candidate, increasing paranoia, and contradictory political theology tore apart the town of Commerce, which he had renamed Nauvoo[...,] Park makes this story vivid in his fascinating, well-told take on antebellum America." -- theNationalBookReview.com
".. Where is the author’s knowledge that Joseph Smith was a prophet and the Lord revealed his words to him? To take out faith, a belief that God speaks to his prophet, and the sacrifice of thousands of early Latter-day Saints to build up Nauvoo (and their reason why) is to miss the mark. .. " --Susan Easton Black, Interpreter[9] [More]: " .. I wanted to share with the author additional facts and clear up the speculations in his work that mar the publication and his future career. The bottom line is that I came away from my first read of Kingdom of Nauvoo knowing the author missed the joy of Nauvoo’s true history as he reached for sensational topics that sell in today’s market — polygamy and the Council of Fifty. I asked myself why this author, with an academic background from Brigham Young University and a bright academic future, aligned himself with scholarship that degrades a prophet of God. .. Can it really be concluded that the Council of Fifty was formed in reaction to tensions and the threat of violence by suspicious outsiders? Was Nauvoo an 'asylum' for God’s chosen people? Is the law of plural marriage and clandestine domestic arrangements synonymous? Did Joseph Smith get his ideas from popular theologian Thomas Dick or mystical elements from Emanuel Swedenborg? Did stories of adultery, fornication, and other illicit sexual dalliances fill Nauvoo’s civic and ecclesiastical courts? I think not. .. " -- SE Black --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 00:37, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
".. Glen Leonard's A Place of Peace, a People of Promise bridged the historical divide between the old bedtime stories of the perfection that was Nauvoo and the new world of historical breadth and depth of research. Richard Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling did not hesitate to tackle the history of Nauvoo polygamy and Joseph Smith’s role in and practice of that marital form.[ . . . ]Benjamin E. Park[ . . . ]makes a very specific contribution to our understanding of the reality and meaning of Nauvoo: He yanks Nauvoo out of its Brigadoonish fantasy world and places it on the firm ground of American political and social history of the 1830s and '40s. No longer is Nauvoo a purely religious creation without beginning nor end; it now grows from the roots of its time and place in both a political world and the realm of Mormon response to that world. And Ben does it beautifully, making the fullest use yet of newly available documents like the Council of Fifty minutes (which, again, he does not pretend exist solely within the Mormon religious sphere, but which he uses to tie the city of Nauvoo and its court and executive systems to the American world from which they sprang). .. " - Ardis Parshall, Keepapitchinin[10]
". . If you read just this volume, you might find yourself scratching your head as to why all these converts found Joseph [Smith]’s message so compelling in the first place. (Park doesn’t ignore this, but he doesn’t dwell on it.) [. . .] I found this a useful book to read about Joseph Smith. But I wouldn’t make it the only book you read about him." - David Evans, Times & Seasons[11]
". . Park really did have lots of new material (huzzah!), but I think he was also right to reference #MeToo; and collectively our people have a long way to go to grapple with both our history and our present sexism and the harm it’s done. Just as potent, however, is an incredibly ascendant but dehumanizingly simplistic story of how faith communities are established and maintained—a Richard Dawkins-esque story about ignorance, superstition, and the reality of zealotry as a fact of human psychology. . ." - James Olsen, TimesAndSeasons.org blogpost comment (in thread below David Evans's post "The Delicious Detail of Benjamin Park’s Book The Kingdom of Nauvoo") [12]
". . Park, to his credit, does not play to the cheap seats. He downplays the sensational and the lurid. Park's account of the events of those tumultuous years is as clear as a story can be that has dozens of characters. He writes with clarity and economy; the book is not a sentence longer than it needs to be. . ." - James Krohe Jr, Illinois Times[13] --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 00:37, 25 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
". . there’s the genre in which active church members examine their faith. Too often, however, Latter-day Saint writers take special pains to demonstrate just how objective they are in a well-intentioned but ultimately gauche bid to convince readers that they’re playing it straight. The tragedy of this kind of performative objectivity is that it usually steers clear of the very texture and personal vulnerability that might actually lend relevant insight into what animates the faith tradition. Maybe the most striking example of this would include[,...] in the realm of popular history, Benjamin Park’s recent 'Kingdom of Nauvoo.' . ." - Hal Boyd, Deseret News[14]
". . Park’s argument is more subtle and interesting: Joseph Smith and his followers, he agrees, are best understood as a product of their time and place — the early nineteenth century American republic, a place of religious revivals, rapid change, and a faith in the future of the American experiment. But they also represented a distinct challenge to that republic and to that civic-minded optimism. . ." - Christopher Jones, JI[15] (also a review of the Deseret News review immediately above)
"Recent years have been a boon for Mormon studies. With publications from top university presses, the establishment of university chairs across the country, and the development of Mormon studies as a specialty field within several doctoral programs, it would seem that Mormon studies has entered a new stage of scholarly respectability. Key to this development were veterans of the field, such as Richard Bushman, Kathleen Flake, D. Michael Quinn, Jan Shipps, and Terryl L. Givens. But now a crop of rising stars is emerging, of which Benjamin E. Park's name can be added with his Kingdom of Nauvoo . ." - Daniel N. Gullotta, American Nineteenth Century History[16] --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 18:22, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Park's portrait of Joseph Smith, meanwhile, is riveting. It is also largely unvarnished by apologies for the indefensible." "Kingdom of Nauvoo is a page-turning and punchy account of the rise and fall of one of mid-nineteenth-century America's most radical experiments. Because it so effortlessly weaves together Mormon history with larger questions about the nature of American democracy, it is ideally suited for the undergraduate classroom and deserves a wide general audience." - John G. Turner, Journal of Mormon History --Hodgdon's secret garden (talk) 00:43, 21 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
