why do we write books? Why did Joseph Smith write his, and why does Samuel Brown write on Smith writing his? I suppose this regressive query may sound mildly absurd coming from one academic to others, largely alert to career, pride, obligation and, optimistically, to the love of shared knowing. Perhaps I have written too many myself, read far more and—just now—for whatever reason, find this rhetorical question springing to mind. By contrast, it is usually easy to answer the question of how someone has written their book, ascertain its genre, and comment on its single disciplinary driver or, as here, its eclectic sources and contributory comments from friends and colleagues. In today's exponential though often silo-like growth in information, our work is as often subject to serendipity as to intentional mastery. So, too, as far as reviews are concerned, not least this reflection, made more in support than criticism of a book I find as intellectually pleasing as, occasionally, methodologically problematic.At the outset, I map the book's topics before focusing on three issues: identity theory, eclectic hermeneutics, and the scholarly legitimation of religious groups through publication. Accordingly, Brown's introduction is followed by section 1, “Contexts,” in three chapters: (1) The Quest for Pure Language, (2) The Nature of Time, and (3) Human and Divine Selves. Then section 2, itself headed “Texts,” covering (4) The Task of the Book of Mormon: To Save the Bible, First You Must Kill It, (5) Rereading the Bible: Joseph Smith's Translation, (6) The Egyptian Bible and the Cosmic Order, and (7) The Transcendent Immanent Temple. Finally, we have a brief epilogue, a most extensive bibliography of some 450 or so entries, and a valuable index.This list whets the appetite for what emerges as Brown's conceptual preoccupation with certain primordial dynamics driving Joseph Smith's venture of “translation” worked out through “The Words and Worlds of Early Mormonism,” as his subtitle puts it. Brown has, of course, already written extensively on death, death conquest, and the afterlife in his monograph In Heaven as it is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death.1 This new volume complements that work to some extent, but with Joseph Smith's desire to conquer language, preexisting scriptures, time, space, and deity taking center stage. Despite some discipline-specific critiques, Brown makes a valuable contribution to the growing genre of the cultural studies of Mormon groups.First, then, to identity theory as a way of approaching Joseph Smith's state of mind in Brown's thought. Here I do not allude to any form of psychological reductionism as in the genre-train of Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther,2 but something more akin to a hybrid of Mircea Eliade and Max Weber, who both make brief appearances: Eliade, with his poetic, humane, and semimystical phenomenological certainty that the sacred is “an element of the structure of consciousness and not a moment in the history of consciousness,”3 and Weber's alertness to the interplay of concept and affect in the idea-pervading, distinctive religious mood (Gesinnungsethik) serving as the vehicle of salvation.4 Other potential hybrids flood the mind, which is understandable given the diversity of scholarship devoted to humanity's religious ventures.Brown's goal, however, lies in finding just the right concept combination to bring today's reader into some sort of understanding of Smith's situation, and he does with “primordial” elements (74), a notion centripetally attracting such themes as sacred-secrecy, wisdom traditions, priesthoods, and most especially family bonding. Brown's affinity with primordial dynamics generates this book's extended account of how he sees them developing within Joseph's personal spirituality and community leadership—all, again, framed by Smith family ties, evolving capacities for death conquest, religious protest, and ever-ongoing cosmic possibilities. Brown pursues what we might call Joseph Smith's dissonance of defiance, or essential sectarian spirit, through familiar themes of opposition (180) and Smith's “signature polytheism” (44), as well as by a certain haunting “no man knows my history” motif based on a statement Smith made near the end of his life. Perhaps prophetic voices always host a certain personal self-defiance, let alone defiance of institutional churches, as the resulting dissonance energizes ongoing innovation.As far as Brown “knows” something of Joseph Smith's identity, he is much concerned with Smith and “the rhetoric of modern selves,” especially in terms of a “promised individualism as a prison from which he hoped to liberate his followers” (83, 96–104), and the clear paradox of “human perfectionism framed within anti-individualism” (89). Or, as captured in one of Brown's many one-liners, “Individualism was as much a prison as hell” (97). Indeed, he is good at pithy propositions that jostle one's presuppositions, as with, “More would be needed to finally heal the Bible” (163). Much could be invoked here, whether Weber's later use of the “iron cage” motif and besetting bureaucratic shaping of social identity, or secularization and privacy of religious expression as with Charles Taylor, who is much in evidence.My interest, however, lies in the potential value of a particular stream of identity theory that is largely absent in most Western intellectual traditions, as well as in this book, too. In my slightly apologetic criticism of absence, I determinedly focus not on the “individual” and “individualism,” but on “dividual” or complex personhood. Personhood subsists in the complex interplay of influence of all who help make us who we are, including other people, places, and influencing texts. As a concept, dividuality can, to considerable advantage, displace the postmodern social theorist's autonomous self. I argue this here because I have found it highly valuable when considering human identity and mortality, and because it might well find a distinctive affinity with Mormon conceptions of personhood, exaltation, and destiny.5 Once hermeneutical axes shift, new dimensions reveal themselves and here the arena of application would include Joseph Smith, his family relations, how he “agonised over the status of kith and kin,” sensed that it “wasn't enough to be saved alone,” and in his “hunger for companionship” (96).I also highlight dividual identity dynamics because, in my own wisdom after the event, this perspective opens new forms of interpretation, most especially in terms of loss, bereavement, and in grief theories as such.6 Given Joseph Smith's ritual and belief preoccupation with the dead, not least with his deceased brother Alvin who is, perhaps, notably absent in this book when compared with Brown's In Heaven as it is on Earth, this could foster some new thinking.What now of Brown's interpretative perspectives and the ever-vexed hermeneutical issue of the imposition of categories upon textual, historical, and community materials gathered for analysis? Certainly, literary, textual-critical, historical, sociological and cultural hermeneutics are some of the scholar's tools of the trade without which we are largely left with mere description or, slightly better, with finely honed narrative or, at best, stylistic re-presentation of materials. A problem emerges, however, as soon as we impute or even seem to impute such analytical perspectives to the person studied, in this case to Joseph Smith. Just what are the differences between Joseph Smith's dynamic drivers and Brown's interpretative theories? Some clarification of those two modes of analysis would make this a more accessible text as far as I am concerned. At a minor level, this applies to Charles Taylor's repeated appearance and reflections on notions of the secular and their applicability to Joseph Smith's day, and to Brown's explicit invocation of Mircea Eliade in terms of qualitatively special designations of duration (55). Though slightly different, the frequent use of the notion of “Targum” for the interpretative transformation of texts, evokes issues of attitudes to sacred texts and the resonances raised, and possibly intended, between some Jewish and Joseph's mindsets.Far more significant, however, is Brown's focal preoccupation with the notion of the primordial, as when he says, “Joseph Smith's primordialism is staggering for him” (69), and “Smith's primordialism drew on a set of ancient wisdom traditions” (74). In terms of emergent temple ritual, early Saints not only “participated directly in the primeval history of the world,” but they also “found themselves arriving at the eschatological end of time, drawn into a final salvation” (78). However, amid these dynamics of duration, “the eschaton was always also the primordium,” with Saints standing “poised in the overlap” (79). Something of the subtle distinction of levels of interpretation occurs in Brown's approach to what and how Joseph Smith was doing when engaged in his New Translation of the Bible: Smith “was inhabiting scripture” and being both “esoteric and exoteric: learned and visionary.” On that same page, when referring to Moses 6:63 and alignments of things temporal and spiritual, above and beneath, Brown frames his comment in terms of “metaphysical correspondence” and the observation that “this Neoplatonic-sounding aside makes clear to readers the deep infrastructure of the typology and likening that occurs throughout Smith's scripture” (184). It is not hard to speak of religious devotees of Christian traditions in many eras, as “inhabiting” scriptures, especially now that many narrative, embodiment, and material culture theories ply their trade through “lived experience,” but the Neoplatonic-sounding gloss may infer or impute too much.This brings me to my final concern, and the enormously challenging topic of how scholarly research and publication enhances and legitimates groups, be they religious, political, or almost of any kind. While not the best place to pursue this issue, I raise it because groups associated with Joseph Smith find significant parts of both their endo- and exoskeletons in books. Some are deemed sacred or devotional texts, others as anti-Mormon literature, while the ever-expanding body of academic studies creates its own form of reification. Why, then do we write books? Brown shares with many of us a love of ideas. In this, as in previous work, he has not only accumulated much information but also an imaginative and valuable cluster of hermeneutical insights to apply to them. I have not touched upon his fondness for “Chain of Belonging” (247); time “measured in parental bonds” (251); “metaphysical correspondence” (241), “metaphysical plasma of word and being” (273), or “the fluid identity of metaphysical correspondence” (234). Nor of tens of other intriguing issues, but, together, they allow him to “see” what he thinks Joseph Smith was “doing,” and how early church members generated their worldview, and he wants readers to “see” it too, all evocative of Weber's sociological approach to “understanding.”Brown's worthwhile study adds another stratum to the geological rise of Mormon cultural studies and, in that sense, also to Mormon culture. What Brown saw in Joseph Smith's relationship with biblical material, a “deep intent hovering beyond language, like the spirit of God brooding over the abyss in Genesis 1” (190), is what he has deployed much endeavor in conveying to us. Why, then, do we write books, especially books about religion? Answers often shimmer just under, or actually break, the surface in the final lines, whether as allusion or proclamation. Given my developing uncertainty over this book's methodological rationale, I did ponder its conclusion's reference to early Mormon groups where “everyone had a priesthood to bear,” and where temple rituals framed their “eternally durable relations” as they “themselves became scriptural” (274). Having attended many Latter-day Saint testimony meetings, I wondered whether this was its own allusive version. If so, then well and good, but some clarity over just how reflexive and ultimately autobiographical these propositional sentiments were might benefit those less familiar with Mormon patterns of engagement while also helping frame many a preceding chapter. But, perhaps, some books simply need to keep us guessing.