This is Elder Maxwell's latest book. It's a kind of summing-up of his favorite themes: warnings about the final days, the divine plan for each one of our lives, adversity, the prophet Joseph Smith. By now we take for granted his eloquence: we shouldn't. It's a rare thing for a church leader to construct literary sentences that stay with you for years afterward. One could call Elder Maxwell "the Great Contextualizer." He manages to put into perspective the social dimensions of the gospel. It's easy to look at the front pages of the newspaper and get discouraged: Maxwell offers elegant commentary on those headlines (even if he just alludes. The Savior used the same method.) I especially liked his chapters on "The Gift of the Holy Ghost" and "The Spirit World." They are marvels of concise explication of "Mormon doctrine." And here is a guy who reads a lot in order to fit the pieces together: in the bibliography you will find (alongside respected LDS authors); Alan Bullock, Robert Frost, Will Durant, Michael Harrington, Gertrude Himmelfarb, John Lukacs, Malcolm Muggeridge, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and George Will, among others.

There's a splendid, pungent quote on page 40 by the great neo-conservative historian Eugene Genovese. This is a worthy addition to his previous work.

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R.W. Rasband
Heber City, UT
rrasband@yahoo.com