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Review - Saints, Sinners, and Sovereign Citizens: The Endless War Over the West's Public Lands (John L. Smith)

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 I received an electronic copy of this book for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I have mixed feelings about this book. A three-star rating is not a bad one; based on the definitions Goodreads gives, it means "I liked it." And that's true; this book was an interesting introduction to the legislative history of public lands in Nevada, and I came away with a somewhat greater understanding of the sovereign citizens movement in the rural West than I had before reading it (while I've occasionally encountered sovereign citizen types here in Michigan, they are of a somewhat different variety).

This book's greatest weakness is one that I hope is merely a function of this being a pre-publication review copy: the editing is distractingly bad. The same person's name might be spelled two different ways on the same page; the same sentence will appear, verbatim, in adjacent paragraphs. Years are frequently subject to typos, such that at several points I had to rely on the rest of the context to know whether something happened in the 19th century or in the 20th. I sincerely hope that these faults will be corrected before the book's final publication date, and I would not have mentioned them at all in the review if they had not been so pervasive and distracting.

Otherwise, my chief complaint is that in its attempt to provide a broad overview of the debate over federal public lands in Nevada (and to some extent the West as a whole), the book sometimes seems to lose focus. Fascinating and somewhat relevant as an extended digression into the origins of the LDS church and the migration of Mormons to the Southwest may be in understanding the Bundy family (and it is though the lens of the Bundy family that the book begins and ends its look at the conflict between the sovereign citizens movement and federal public land policy), the book's historical narrative ultimately moves and forth through time to an extent that makes it difficult for someone not particularly familiar with Nevada history to keep a clear mental timeline of events.

Still, it was an enjoyable and interesting book and I felt that I learned quite a bit. If I were to read it a second time, I doubt I would go through front-to-back but would instead approach it almost more as a collection of essays on a shared theme by a single author.

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