This book does not include the traditional account. It only responds to it. . . . This explanation of events is not based on personal preferences, but it instead conforms with prophecies about Mormonism. The result is a story unlike the familiar one. There is no reassuring, no declarations of success in facing the challenges within our new religion. If you are a faithful Latter-day Saint, as I am, you will need to be open-minded as you go through this book. Some conclusions are very different from what you are used to. A great deal of what is regarded as "well settled" is, upon close investigation, merely a series of inconsistent leaps of faith unwarranted by the record. Alternatively, they are simply inaccurate, incomplete or untrue. In the traditional story written and told by Mormons to one another, there has been a great deal of revising, or explaining events from hindsight. I have found ideas that I once considered renegade are, in fact, an accurate explanation of events at the time they happened.