The morning promised no bright sun. No blue sky. Only dust from the desert’s chalky red soil. “Lord in heaven,” Rosalinda said to herself. She stared out the window, worried about her garden. She couldn’t…
My wife, Freida, could have worked for Cecil B. DeMille or Steven Spielberg, given her cast-of-thousands knack for the spectacular. Take to night, for instance. In the name of fellowshipping, and to beef up our…
The flask lay under a loose plank on the back porch. To someone lifting the board there was only an empty space, but when Wayne knelt and reached to his elbow beneath the adjacent board,…
“You shall not do it,” she said. A mere murmur, those words, deceptively soft, even gentle. Almost subliminal, though distinctly determined to anyone who knew her as he did. She had, in fact, employed the…
“And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.” Isaiah 34:13 “I will make a wailing…
The letters in this issue reflect accurately the relative quantity of letters received on the different subjects as well as the various points of view. Dear Sirs: I am much interested in the cover of…
Elsewhere in this issue Robert Flanders speaks of the New Mormon History as having begun in 1945 with the publication of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History. While Brodie’s book is certainly pivotal, an…
At the invitation of Sunstone, I sat down a couple of years ago to write a book review of Samuel Woolley Taylor’s Rocky Mountain Empire. As did Topsy, that review just grew and grew until…
For the past six years, I have been engaged in various dialogues best under stood by a quick trip through the editorial correspondence files, a sort of diary (or dia-log) of my term as editor.…
You’re sure to hear a few such discordant notes as Brooks’s fingers glide up and down the scale, but to focus on such slips overlooks the book’s overall melody, the song of a Mormon girl whose nascent faith is challenged, lost, found, and refined by fire throughout. She’s the prodigal daughter telling only a little about years of riotous living, more about the faith of her youth and the re-visioned faith of her adulthood. Memoirs aren’t intended to tell a disconnected story of one’s life, but to invite readers into an intensely subjective world. The best memoirs aren’t written as how-to manuals (like the Marie Osmond brand beauty and fashion instructions Brooks read as an awkward, body-conscious young girl. You’re sure to laugh out loud as she spends a chapter pillorying such fluff). Instead, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed, good memoirs awaken “a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, and they tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience.”2 American publisher William Sloan says readers of such works are not so much saying to the author “Tell me about you,” but rather “Tell me about me; as I use your book and life as a mirror.”