Writing a book of short stories/sketches about a group of missionaries in France is picking a hard door to knock on—missionary work is surrounded with ideals, taboos, and nostalgia—but Gladys Clark Farmer makes it swing…
J. Kenneth Davies, a long-time student of Utah labor history, has been interested in the relationship between the labor movement in Utah and the Mormon Church. Deseret’s Sons of Toil is intended to be a…
This excellent, provocative study breaks new ground in probing the history of the Intermountain West. It had its inception when Professor Alexander noticed the widespread dissatisfaction of the residents of the far western Territories with…
Mormons have always had a passion for recording the experiences that shaped their lives—their dreams, ideals, intentions and conceptions of themselves. The sheer volume of their diaries, journals and other records stagger the imagination. Nothing…
In one of his fascinating scientific survey books, this time dealing with the latest discoveries about the brain, Nigel Calder notes, “Two of the most self-evident characteristics of the conscious mind are that 1) the mind attends to one thing at a time, and 2) that at least once a day the conscious mind is switched off.”
“Of making of books there is no end.” These words from Ecclesiastes could as well be applied to the more than thirty thousand doctoral dissertations and an even larger number of master’s theses completed in…
The ridge is crusted with blue snow.
Evening descends, learning its way
to the river, the slow deep core of winter.
It might never happen, I say.
The wind might rise
on the lake and then every
image would be broken,
scattered into itself.
At the second annual meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters, as at the first, two literary concerns seemed to have emerged. Not so surprisingly, at the bottom of both these issues was the question…
In A Believing People, Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert lament that the essay “has not been as vital a literary force in Mormondom as might be expected.” Early Mormons, they note, kept forceful diaries, wrote…