<< Lecture at Denver College | Home | Why I Wrote the Warren Jeffs Book >>

Amazon.com's Description of "When Men Become Gods"

In When Men Become Gods, New York Times bestselling author Stephen Singular casts a light on a dark corner of religious extremism. He reveals a group of fundamentalists operating in the present-day United States, where teenage girls are kept in virtual bondage in the name of upholding the “sacred principle” of polygamy.

As the leader and self-proclaimed prophet of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a sect of Mormonism based in isolated southern Utah, Warren Jeffs held sway over thousands of followers for nearly a decade. His rule was utterly tyrannical. In addition to coercing young girls into polygamous marriages with older men, Jeffs reputedly took scores of wives, many of whom were his father’s widows. Television, radio, and newspapers were shunned, creating a hidden community where polygamy was prized above all else.

But in 2007, after a two-year manhunt that landed him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Jeffs’s reign was forcefully ended. He was convicted of rape as an accomplice for his role in arranging a marriage between a fourteen-year-old girl and her nineteen-year-old first cousin.

In When Men Become Gods, Edgar Award nominee Stephen Singular traces Jeffs’s rise to power and the concerted effort that led to his downfall. It was a movement championed by law enforcement, private investigators, the Feds, and perhaps most vocal of all, a group of former polygamous wives seeking to liberate young women from the arranged marriages they’d once endured. The book offers new revelations into a nearly impenetrable enclave---a place of nineteenth-century attire, inbreeding, and eerie seclusion---providing readers with a rare glimpse into a tradition that’s almost a century old, but that has only now been exposed.

This book focuses on the criminal investigation into the FLDS that started in 2004 in Arizona and has now exploded with law enforcement entering the compound in Eldorado, Texas, and removing more than 400 children from the property. The book is not an account of one or two individual's escape from polygamy, but confronts the larger issue surrounding this subject: where does religious freedom end and criminal behavior begin? When Men Become Gods is the story behind the stories now coming out of Texas.

Print | posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 12:05 AM

Feedback

No comments posted yet.
Title  
Name  
Email
Url
Comments   
Please add 8 and 3 and type the answer here: