Bridge Book Club: The King of Confidence
Date and time
Location
Online event
Join Bridge Michigan for August's Bridge Book Club discussion of "The King of Confidence." Author Miles Harvey will join us!
About this event
Our bimonthly Bridge Book Club resumes in August and our selection is The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch by Miles Harvey. We're honored to be joined by the author for our Bridge Book Club Zoom event!
In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. In the wake of the murder of the sect's leader, Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor, and persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to an island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king.
The King of Confidence tells this fascinating but largely forgotten story. Centering his narrative on Strang's turbulent twelve years in power, Miles Harvey gets to the root of a timeless American original: the Confidence Man.