Gary Topping

Mormon-Catholic Relations in Utah History: A Sketch

Genealogical Blockbuster | Arlene H. Eakle and Johni Cerny, eds., The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy

You don’t have to be consumed with genealogical passion to profit from this new work of far-reaching and fundamental importance, though those who are will buy it as a matter of course and use it…

The Ultimate Stegner Interview | Wallace Stegner and Richard W. Etulain, Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature

With the possible exception of Louis L’Amour, Wallace Stegner has probably been interviewed more frequently than any other living Western writer. This is an impressive tribute to Stegner’s accessibility to representatives of both scholarly and…

Dale Morgan’s Unfinished Mormon History | John Philip Walker, ed., Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History

It would be difficult to say too much in praise of John Phillip Walker’s new contribution to Mormon historiography, a field that is bursting with recent major studies. Walker’s book deserves a place on the…

Women Coping | Linda Sillitoe, Sideways to the Sun

What happens when a Mormon house wife, faithful to husband and church, encounters the dark side of human experience including adultery, child molestation, spouse abandonment, and divorce? In this fine first novel, Linda Sillitoe answers…

History of Historians | Davis Bitton and Leonard Arrington, Mormons and Their Historians

That such a volume as this could be written at all is happy testimony to the development of a Mormon historiographical tradition. Its appearance at this late date, however—over a century and a half after…

Mormon Woman Historian | Levi S. Peterson, Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian

Students of Utah and Mormon historiography ought to be rejoicing at the flowering of literature in that field over recent years. Beginning perhaps in the last decade with Wallace Stegner’s biography of Bernard DeVoto and…

Quest for Meaning | Judith Freeman, The Chinchilla Farm: A Novel

As 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…

Nothing New Under the Sun | Mary Farrell Bednarowski, New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America

While it is beyond the capability of any book to demonstrate the infinite capacity of human belief, there seems nevertheless to be little reason to doubt the existence of such infinitude, and Mary Farrell Bednarowski…

Reappraisal of a Classic: Great Basin Kingdom Revisited: Contemporary Perspectives edited by Thomas G. Alexander

Personality and Motivation in Utah Historiography