A pioneer in the Mormon exposé , Deborah Laake recounts her strict Mormon upbringing and two disastrous Mormon marriages that left her a pariah in the church. Laake chronicles her life from innocence to full initiation. Married at 19, she describes the voodoo-like rituals and behaviors revealed to her on her wedding day- and the male dominance, strange teachings, and " divine" revelations characteristic...

""I am the daugher of my father's fourth plural wife, twenty-eighth of forty-eight children - a middle kid, you might say." So begins this memoir of life in the family of Utah fundamentalist leader and naturopathic physician Rulon C. Allred. Since polygamy was abolished by manifesto in 1890, this is a story of secrecy and lies, of poverty and imprisonment and government raids. When raids threatened, the families were forced to scatter from their pastoral...