Let’s finish this stretch with Twain’s sharpest humor: he tears into the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print" yet can’t help being fascinated by how the whole thing actually works.

It’s funny, a little rude, and oddly admiring — Twain sees Mormonism as a quintessentially American act of reinvention: wildly implausible, stubbornly successful, and totally worth a laugh (and a second look).