DiaBLOGue
Quest for Meaning | Judith Freeman, The Chinchilla Farm: A Novel
April 14, 2018As a child in Willard, Utah, Verna Flake remembered a search party being called when someone had let the neighbors’ chinchillas out of their cage. In the end, fears that the exotic, expensive little animals…
Tempering Memories | Frederick Stewart Buchanan, ed., A Good Time Coming: Mormon Letters to Scotland
April 14, 2018The letters in this collection, ably edited and annotated, are neither literate nor consistently interesting. They lack informed perspective and only occasion ally throw any light on the larger questions of the times of which…
Hearkening Unto Other Voices | Robert L. Millet, ed., “To Be Learned Is Good If…”
April 14, 2018When I first picked up a copy of To Be Learned Is Good If . . . I assumed that the implied remainder of the title would be a continuation of Jacob’s famous statement about hearkening…
Passion Poems | Emma Lou Thayne, How Much for the Earth?
April 14, 2018One might suspect that a book of poems published by Utahns United Against the Nuclear Arms Race might possess as interesting a history as the poems that comprise it. How Much for the Earth? by…
New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century St. George | Larry M. Logue, A Sermon in the Desert: Belief and Behavior in Early St. George, Utah
April 14, 2018A Sermon in the Desert should be taken seriously by those interested in early St. George and in the workings of polygamy and family life in a small nineteenth-century Utah community. It offers to local…
Mormon Splinter Groups | Hans A. Baer, Recreating Utopia in the Desert: A Sectarian Challenge to Modern Mormonism
April 14, 2018In this ethnography of a Mormon splinter group, Hans Baer postulates that Mormonism’s capacity to produce schisms is a two-fold reflection of itself. As Mor monism entered the mainstream in this century, it abandoned its…
Pertinent to Our Enterprise | Wayne C. Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher
April 14, 2018Why, you may ask, review a book on teaching for Dialogue! The reasons are several and compelling.
In the first place, author Wayne C. Booth, surely one of the most significant critics now writing in English and perhaps in any language, unashamedly traces his roots to Mormonism.
And
April 14, 2018The association of man and woman In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— A dignified and commodious sacrament. Two by two, necessarye coniunction, T. S. Eliot Amos enjoyed her company, but he felt lost. Despite the many times they had walked…
How I Destroyed the Old Salt Lake Theatre
April 14, 2018Yep, it was me who done it. Me and the kid with the telescope. We were the cause of the historic theatre’s demolition. Let me tell you how it happened. I was living in Salt…