Dorothy Allred Solomon author of Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk, who comes from a prominent line of polygamists, puts a more human face on this subject by describing her own experience as the 28th of her father's 48 children. She was raised by seven mothers and remembers a time "when Daddy went away to college." This was actually when he served five years in prison for illegal cohabitation.
If Solomon's story sometimes sounds like the stuff of daytime television talk shows, it is. She regrets having been bumped from a date on Donahue by Winnie Mandela and has appeared with Sally Jessy Raphael. But it is a remarkable tale. She grew up with the knowledge that the mere fact of her birth could mean more prison time for her father, Rulon C. Allred (a physician who is also mentioned by Krakauer). She hid with her family to avoid government raids and tells how one faction wound up in a remote spot, living on nothing but carrots.
And of course she witnessed the everyday reality of a polygamous family. "You promised us you would marry only virgins," she says that the mothers insisted, when Allred wondered whether it was his spiritual duty to take more wives. (He did. He wound up with 16.) Allred's assassination in 1977 by a rival fundamentalist group fits into the bloody tradition that all these books describe.
Solomon is best when not being lyrical. And for the most part she is outspoken and frank, free of the dissembling to avoid prosecution that she calls "practicing Mormon logic." To Krakauer, this is "lying for the Lord."
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