Last year, I started reading Saints: The Standard of Truth (Volume 1), as it went along with our assignment for 2021 to read the Doctrine and Covenants.
I suppose it was exactly what I expected to be -- a narrative easy to read that would nicely complement our reading of scripture and Church history. (As a reminder, this is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
This book provides early Church history, and explains the backdrop for all the modern day revelations. I believe every section of D&C is covered.
One funny thing to mention, though, is that if you do read this along with the D&C, the coverage, time wise, is somewhat lopsided. This is no fault of the book itself, but just the way it is. A lot of the earlier sections of the D&C happen over a short amount of time. One chapter in Saints can cover several sections of the D&C. After about 1835, it flip-flops. The D&C sections become much more sparse, while several chapters pass in Saints. As it was, I ended up finishing this book around February though we were done with D&C on Dec. 31.
The book covers events up through 1846, starting with Joseph Smith's early life, establishing the Church, gathering more Saints (members of the Church), moving to Ohio, then Missouri, and lastly Illinois, covering all the persecutions from enemies and even disgruntled prior members -- leading up to the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, and extending a couple of months after that as Brigham Young evacuates Nauvoo.
I probably already knew 80% of what's in the book -- or at least the main stories. But there was a lot of new material I had never heard before, in particular the true stories of individuals living within the main story line. It includes some of the mistakes the Saints made along the way -- even explaining how some of their actions may have exacerbated their own persecutions. I also learned some more detail surrounding the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, including how Governor Boggs' baseless claims landed him in jail, how Joseph and company came to be armed, how the first murder attempt was thwarted (yeah -- I didn't know there was a first attempt), and other interesting details.
At the same time, the narrative remains light. I don't know if you read the New York Times newsletters, but it's like that, giving light details, and then providing links (footnotes) for anyone to go and get much more detail. Sometimes I found myself frustrated, because I wanted more -- and sometimes I got confused with some pronoun usage -- where I wasn't sure who was doing what. I would have been perfectly happy with a slightly higher level of detail.
The writers did their best to keep events in chronological order. Though sometimes the story warranted going back a little to maintain flow. Then again -- some stories were split into several sections spread out over several chapters. Often when an earlier story line picked up again, I would have some trouble remembering what had happened before -- and I ended up wishing that that particular person's story was told in one chunk instead of being spread out in five chunks. It does effectively give the sense of how many developments were happening at the same time -- how some events were independent while everything was still tied to their overall successes and struggles.
I recommend this book to people not of my church, as it provides an excellent light-reading introduction. It tries its best to present multiple sides of the story, though you should know going in that it's clearly biased. This is because it's ultimately produced by the Church, itself. As such, it's available for free download from several different outlets. (I believe I downloaded my copy from Amazon for free.)
And the biggest plus for this book -- an amazing amount of research. It's worth reading just for the introductory information it provides. There's also a Volume 2 that carries through 1893. I'll start reading that sometime in the next couple of years. Volume 3 will come out shortly, taking us to 1955. And the final Volume 4 will take us to the present. Eventually I'll read the whole series.
If you'd like to learn more -- just pick up a copy, and start reading.
