Photos by Floyd Holdman and Don O. Thorpe

The Way, the Truth, and the Life is the second coffee-table book about the Holy Land by S. Michael Wilcox, a popular instructor at the University of Utah Institute and prolific LDS writer. The first, On Holy Ground: Images of Old Testament Lands, published by Covenant in 2001, is in some ways the superior book. Not only did it include John Telford's beautiful photographs (apparently recycled from Susan Easton Black's 1999 contribution to the same genre, In the Footsteps of Jesus: Images of the Holy Land, also published by Covenant), but as the first in the series, it was more careful to define its authorial voice, which is important given that this is a book that positions itself outside familiar genres. It's not really a coffee-table book; although Holdman and Thorpe are apparently widely-published photographers, the photos chosen for this particular project are of mixed quality and alternate with nineteenth-century maps and illustrations more probably chosen for the virtue of their lapsed copyrights than for their dubious esthetic qualities. Neither is it a commentary on the historical or archaeological context for the pictured sites, like Jefferson White's Evidence of Paul's Journeys or John Crossan and Jonathan Reed's Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts.

In fact, a first reading left me scratching my head. The "author's preface" is simply the JST of John 1: 1-5. Chapter 1, "Even Unto Bethlehem," began starkly and a little clumsily:

"Bethlehem has always been one of my favorite sites. I look forward to it with the same anticipatory emotion that I looked forward to Christmas morning as a child. There is a joy and a delight that still rings in Bethlehem. We start in the shepherd's fields by reading the simple, beautiful words of Luke annually repeated in homes all over the world at the Christmas season."

Who are you? I wonder (a little disingenuously, since we lived in the same ward for a few months.) And who are "we"? Do you mean every Christian? Every reader of this book? Several paragraphs later "the sisters of our group" sing, and I wonder if he is describing a trip he took with his extended family. It is only as the book wears on that the reader gathers that this book is essentially a well-illustrated collection of lecture notes from the LDS student trips Wilcox regularly leads to Palestine.

Despite its bumpy beginning, the narrative taken on its own terms is compelling. It is clear that Wilcox is writing about experiences and musings that matter deeply to him, and if they are not as fully explained or historically situated as I would like, they are as nourishing and homey as a slice of hot wheat bread spread with butter and honey and washed down with a glass of cold milk. Each chapter provides that mixture of information and applied gospel "life lesson" familiar to all who have been lucky enough to witness an earnest parent giving a Family Home Evening lesson to cherished children. As that pillar of American cultural studies, TV Guide, warns in its blurb about the 1950s movie Tammy, this book will be most meaningful "For the pure in heart."

Bottom line: a more polished and sophisticated version of the journal every traveler to the Holy Land wishes they had kept, but offers little new insight.