The Accidental Terrorist : Page 3
The Book of Mormon: Joseph Smith's first novel
This essay is excerpted from The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary, available everywhere November 10, 2015. WARNING: This essay contains graphic descriptions of primitive surgery that some readers may find disturbing. In January 1994, when I was 26...
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Books and reviewers and blurbs, oh my!
I've been making Stamps.com work overtime as I mail out a ton of advance reading copies of The Accidental Terrorist, and it's beginning to pay off. My little book—okay, okay, it's not so little—is attracting some crucial early bits of...
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Mormon underwear is about to get its closeup
Not many people outside of Utah may be aware of it, but a controversy is brewing—and it has to do with Mormon underwear. Specifically, it has to do with the portrayal of Mormon underwear on network television. As reported by...
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Joseph Smith's "capital" idea
As I was working through the very final set of revisions on The Accidental Terrorist, I had to hunt down the original source of a well-known Joseph Smith quote on the topic of the accuracy of the Bible. I found...
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My prescient and fiery memoir cover shoot
We had no idea that what we were really doing was a cover shoot for my memoir. It was the late summer of 1987. I was stationed with my assigned mission companion, Elder Tim Bishop, in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. We...
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Please help me "Close the Book" on my memoir project!
My sixteen-year quest to publish my memoir The Accidental Terrorist is nearly over. I feel like I've been fighting my way down the field all that time, sometimes making progress, sometimes getting stopped cold, sometimes losing big ground. But now...
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The Falcon and the Snowman and me
In 1985, I was a far bigger fan of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny than just about any other musician. The album that infected me was 1982's Offramp, which sounded unlike anything else I'd ever heard. I became a hardcore consumer...
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Send your missionary a margarita!
In a message exchange a few months ago, a friend and former colleague from my missionary days reminded me of a funny story from 1988 involving the elder who was then my companion. I didn't immediately recall the incident, but...
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Our memories remind us, maybe mine is not so bad
I've always believed that I have a pretty good memory—in particular, that I can recall formative events and conversations from years or even decades ago in reasonably good detail. When I started work on my memoir The Accidental Terrorist, I...
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Supercalifornication; or, how a hooker came between me and Oingo Boingo
The following story is an outtake from my memoir The Accidental Terrorist. The names of most of the other participants, including relatives, have been changed to offer some small measure of concealment. When I was eighteen, my father and I...
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