Considered by whom? The book was seen as a betrayal at the time since it was written by a relative of leadership, primarily because it comes from the perspective of a non believer. It's no more "anti" meaning hostile than scholars of the "historical Jesus" are hostile to Christianity in general, they simply take an objective approach. The "why are you all so dogmatically opposed..." bit is a straw man. After so many years most people haven't heard of the book, and those with sufficient historical interest to know the work probably have it sitting on their bookshelf. Most people I know think it's a decent piece of work for its time period. As a general rule, rhetorical devices such as "why do you..." when you haven't the first clue what any of us actually "do" or "Mormons believe..." followed by a misstatement or mischaracterization of what Mormons believe and which may or may not accurately reflect the attitudes of any indivdual reading the question aren't the most productive means of stimulating discussion.

Well, since only ONE Mormon has been willing to step up to the plate and swing the bat I'll have to do so myself to - hopefully - get the ball rolling again on this question: This is NOT an Anti-Mormon book - period. From the WikiPedia article on the book: "Brodie presents the young Joseph Smith as a good-natured, lazy, extroverted, and unsuccessful treasure seeker, who, in an attempt to improve his family's fortunes, first developed the notion of golden plates and then the concept of a religious novel, the Book of Mormon. This book, she claims, was based in part on an earlier work, View of the Hebrews, by a contemporary clergyman Ethan Smith. Brodie asserts that at first Joseph Smith was a deliberate impostor, who at some point, in nearly untraceable steps, became convinced that he was indeed a prophet—though without ever escaping "the memory of the conscious artifice" that created the Book of Mormon. Jan Shipps, a preeminent non-LDS scholar of Mormonism, who rejects this theory, nevertheless has called No Man Knows My History a "beautifully written biography...the work of a mature scholar [that] represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life."[4] During her research, Brodie discovered primary sources that had previously been overlooked or neglected.[5] Nevertheless, two perceived weaknesses of Brodie's work were her limited patience with religion and religious impulses and her tendency to transform conjectures into indisputable facts. In reviewing No Man Knows My History, Vardis Fisher (himself a prolific novelist—and atheist—who remained unconvinced by Brodie’s theory) incorrectly speculated that Brodie would “turn novelist in her next book.”[6] At nearly the same moment, Brodie's friend Dale Morgan declared Brodie’s first book the "finest job of scholarship yet done in Mormon history and perhaps the outstanding biography in several years—a book distinguished in the range and originality of its research, the informed and searching objectivity of its viewpoint, the richness and suppleness of its prose, and its narrative power."[7]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man_Knows_My_History And as one Catholic Reviewer put it so well: "No Man Knows My History is no anti-Mormon academic hit-job, it leaves the reader no other conclusion that Joseph Smith was a fraud of historic standards." http://clementia-militia.blogspot.com/2009/04/no-man-knows-my-history-life-of-joseph.html And we will give Fawn Brodie herself the last word - here's what she had to say on this question: "All historians manipulate by virtue of the selection of the material. "Manipulate" is a nasty word. The good historian tries not to manipulate deliberately but to let the material shape itself. I found, especially with the Joseph Smith book, something fascinating. I was working with non-Mormon, anti-Mormon and Mormon material and I would get three different versions of the same episode--always two, sometimes three--and when I put them together a picture emerged that I believe had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with my selection. I was just putting all the versions together and then, as I say, it was a little like building a mosaic, it was a combination. It was not totally jigsaw either, but a picture emerged so often as I wrote these chapters that I thought this must be the way it happened. It was different from both the anti-Mormon and the Mormon version, but so often the materials fitted nicely. But what I wrote, of course, has been hotly contested by the Mormons, the devout Mormon historians, who have questioned every single line and who have gone back and read everything I wrote and found every small error and checked every footnote. But, this is the fate of anyone who writes controversial history." http://www.amazon.ca/No-Man-Knows-My-History/dp/0679730540 And as the Mormon Reviewer whose review I clipped those quotes from said so well: "Does this sound like someone whose bias is so virulent as to make this biography tainted, and therefore not worthy of consideration? I thought not." So it's clear that those who attack and degrade this book: a) Have never read it, or; b) Are merely exposing their own biases. (And as tempted as I'm am to say, "Are you reading this from the grave Hugh Nibley - that includes YOU" I won't. Oh, I just did didn't I?) So whether you're Mormon or not this is the one Mormon Studies book that you simply must read. It is NOT, I repeat, NOT an Anti-Mormon book.