This is a long and overdue review. Shame on me since I live in Nevada. Author # John L. Smith is someone I've long admired. And his novel #Saints, Sinners, and Sovereign Citizens captures the drama of the Bundy legal tangle.

This was an interesting story that has a long-form journalism feel to it. The ARC I reviewed had a lot of typos, and some sections felt a bit repetitive and probably could use another editing pass. but I learned a lot about this story and more about Nevada as well.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a temporary digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

I was excited to discover a topic that I never explored before. As a European, the split in land ownership between counties and the federal government in the United States was a foreign concept.
This booked opened up otherwise niche topics like ongoing conflicts around the grazing rights on public lands (in the Western states of U.S.) and the less obvious links to religion and far-right militia groups. It felt like an expose of what goes on behind the scenes of a cowboy’s life life in practical terms and how conflicts of principle can escalate and become dangerous in a matter of days.
Written in a journalistic style, the book is maybe not the easiest of reads – but compensates through the abundance of facts. The 2014 Cliven Bundy ranch incident is the trigger story, but the author than builds the full context chapter by chapter. It touches on the history of the Mormon faith, extreme nationalism and racist attitudes that sometimes are interlinked, all the way up to the Trump election in 2017.
If you enjoy reading about current events, you will find this book useful regardless if you are U.S citizen or not. I also enjoyed finding Vice documentaries and Youtube videos linked to the events mentioned in the book.
(I think there is an extra comma on the book cover, although I do appreciate this is an ARC so not fully edited)

I have two major issues with this book: First, it is not edited. Second, it is extremely biased for a nonfiction book.

Now, it is a NetGalley ARC. I get that these generally do not have the final proofread done. I understand that and don’t hold it against them, which is why my rating is generous. But this book reads like a first draft. It hasn’t been edited AT ALL. The content was thrown together willy-nilly. I was never sure what the main focus of the book was. Sentences were repeated either immediately or a page later. Adverb forms were used when adjective forms were necessary. Apostrophes and commas were thrown willy-nilly. Every time he used an apostrophe to make a plural, I died a little inside. There were many words missing and many extraneous words. And very often, wholesentencesrantogetherwithnospacesatall,includingpunctuation.Istartedskippingthesebecausetheytooktoolongtodeciper. There are notes but no numbers in the text to match up with the footnotes. And a lot of his sources I consider unreliable or severely biased.

Sample sentences:
No matter its impact on the Big mining had never been short of friends in the Nevada press.

It appeared to some observers that the public goals of the Sagebrush Rebellion were in reached.

The MX missile project was decided not just another government construction job.

Faust known was a tried and true friend …

An FBI undercover operation working inside the militia unit arrested …

One officer spoke of … the most emotional testimony from officers [ellipse and lack of period in original]

If it wants to be a political book, then it should be clear that’s what it is. I thought this was a nonfiction book. In nonfiction, I expect the author to present the facts—all the facts—and let me draw my own conclusions. I really like seeing all sides of something. This book does not do that. The author is supposedly a journalist. I have a journalism degree and would have flunked out of the major for writing like this.

He talks a lot about the Bundy family but never interviews them. He presents Cliven Bundy as a crackpot. He may be, but I’d like to see that for myself with proper evidence. The author says Bundy is a Mormon fundamentalist. There’s no such thing. This makes no sense. There is a polygamous cult (made famous by Warren Jeffs) that calls itself Fundamentalist Mormonism. So I wasn’t sure if Bundy was a member of this group or if he was this other term the author invented. He presents the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as told through second-hand sources when there are tons of primary sources available. The research in general felt shoddy.

He barely even mentions the Antiquities Act, which is the reason conservatives are against federal ownership or management of Western lands. (Not to mention the resentment toward city-slicker bureaucrats thousands of miles away who can’t even pronounce the names of our states correctly.) The president has power to seize any land he wants and declare it a national monument. There is no criteria for this, no congressional approval necessary. It’s obviously unconstitutional and a concern for conservatives. This should have been a huge part of the book. Instead, he paints all conservatives as whackjobs of the same kind as Alex Jones.

<img src="https://media.giphy.com/media/7gqN2jtvF2OIM/giphy.gif">

He denies the existence of environmental extremists. He lavishes praise on Harry Reid, excusing his corruption as not worse than anyone else’s. EVERY person he talks about is introduced with a ton of adjectives. I don’t care about your opinion! I just want the facts! The few times he was able to keep his opinion out were actually interesting. He skims through the trial, throwing out names without context (yet with opinionated adjectives), until I wasn’t understanding anything I was reading nor why it was important.

So basically I was pissed off the whole time reading this. I really wanted to DNF but felt obligated to finish for NetGalley and you.

Clean content overall.

Thank you Net Galley for the advance

It was okay but too much LDS and not enough on the sovereign issue. It ended on that but there was a whole lot of 'other in between.

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.