[v] Laman has always gotten bad press. True, he was a dolt. He saw angels, he heard the voice of the Lord, he witnessed miracles, and he still didn't get it! Undoubtedly you have always asked yourself, How could anybody be so dense, so indefatigably wicked?
At last in his own words, Laman tells his side of the story. Here is the Laman you always wondered about. Here is the consummate malcontent, revealing all, holding nothing back-allowing readers a glimpse at his multi-phobic personality. Perhaps you will even sympathize with him as he describes his adolescent humiliations, the injustices he suffered at the hands of his siblings-particularly the two younger ones-and the painful neglect of a father who always favored his righteous son, Nephi, over his corrupt older brother.
Here, in vivid detail, meticulously translated from plates of tin, made by his own hands, with the help of his brother Lemuel, Laman recounts the events of his unhappy childhood, revealing the story of a sensitive boy uprooted from his home and a life of idle pleasure and forced to wander for years in the desert, eating raw meat and sleeping on the ground, coerced into sailing half way around the world on a home-made boat with only a one-way ticket, then made to live in a promised land that was totally off the grid.
Through all his sufferings and afflictions, his trials and tribulations, emerges the portrait of one who mastered the art of murmuring as few have, who left as a legacy a rich mosaic of misunderstandings, and whose hardness of heart can never be questioned.
Yes, here is the enigmatic but at last lovable Laman, the man with the unflinching and steadfast faith in the arm of flesh. - Bob Lewis, translator, October 1997
Publisher's note: The plates of Laman came into Bob's hands quite by chance as he was repairing a corrugated tin roof on a bam in Cache Valley, Utah. How the plates ended up as part of the decaying and rusted roof remains a mystery. They were not contrary to rumors that have been circulated, purchased from Mark Hofmann, though there is considerable textual evidence that the record is not as old as it is purported to be. There has been, at the time ofpublication, no carbon dating of the actual tin.
