The struggles and contributions of the Mormon Women are reflected in the lives of Lucy and Emma Smith, women's rights advocate Martha Hughes Cannon, and Church civic leaders such as Eliza R. Snow, Emmeline B. Wells, and Amy Brown Lyman.

The authors' even-handed approach gives the reader an opportunity to evaluate the checkered careers of early leaders such as Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Sidney Rigdon, and John C. Bennett, authors Fanny Stenhouse, Frank J. Cannon, and Fawn Brodie, and renegades Bill Hickman and Orrin Porter Rockwell.

Through a hundred and fifty years of Mormonism, the interaction of such strong and diverse personalities with one another and with their church makes A Book of Mormons a fascinating social history.

Richard S. Van Wagoner, M.S., Brigham Young University, is a clinical audiologist and Lehi city historian. He is the author of Lehi: Portraits of a Utah Town, Mormon Polygamy: A History, and Sidney Rigdon: A Portrait of Religious Excess; and the co-author of A Book of Mormons. He has been published in Brigham Young University Studies, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Sunstone, Utah Historical Quarterly, and Utah Holiday, and has won awards from the Dialogue Foundation, John Whitmer Historical Association, and the Mormon History Association. He is a contributor to The Prophet Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith.

Steven C. Walker, co-author of A Book of Mormons, is an associate professor of English at Brigham Young University serves on a stake Sunday School board in Provo, Utah, where he lives with his wife Ardith and their three children. He is a contributor to The Prophet Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith.