Among the Mormons: A Selected Bibliography of Recent Books

A formidable challenge faces those who try to write confidently about Mormonism only to be denied access to critical resources. It is widely felt among those who follow Mormon scholarship that both Leonard J. Arrington and Richard L. Bushman experienced this problem. Neither of their long awaited studies, Brigham Young: American Moses nor Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, has fared especially well among reviewers. Arlington and Bushman, it is suggested, should have been less apologetic as well as more intellectually challenging. Still, each book is an important work with which all serious students of Mormonism should ultimately become familiar. 

For now, however, most of the attention and praise is being bestowed on Jan Shipps’s Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, American Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power by Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, and Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith by Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery. These three vastly different books will interest both the Mormon and non-Mormon reader alike. A similar experience awaits those who take time to look at Gordon and Gary Shepherd’s A Kingdom Transformed: Themes in the Development of Mormonism and Clifford L. Stott’s Search for Sanctuary: Brigham Young and the White Mountain Expedition. 

Other selections which seemed destined to be widely read include the sev eral new works published by Brigham Young University’s Religious Studies Center and Bruce R. McConkie’s A New Witness for the Articles of Faith.