Books

Richard Evans’ Quote Book
By Richard L. Evans,
edited by Dr. Bruce B. Clark
Publishers Press, 251 pp., $4.95 (Deluxe slipcover, $5.95)

This timely collection of carefully selected quotations was gathered over a forty-year period, during which time Elder Evans wrote and produced “Music and the Spoken Word” on the Tabernacle Choir broadcast, heard on CBS each week from Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

The collection comprises thought-provoking statements from many sources, from wisdom of the ages to contemporary observations. The thoughts of great thinkers are presented in a topical arrangement and cover such subjects as home, marriage, family, youth, age, work, duty, education, government, law, liberty, books, learning, teaching, faith and prayer, death and everlasting life.

From more than 800 sources, here are the ideas of great men, including religious leaders—Joseph Smith, David O. McKay, Joseph Fielding Smith; statesmen—Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill; philosophers—Seneca, Socrates, Plato, and Santayana; as well as passages from the Bible, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Constitution. And here are quotations from the writings of Richard L. Evans, distilled from the rich contributions he has made to life and letters.

This is a book of ideas that have been chosen for their uplifting effect on the reader and that offer stimulating, challenging thoughts, sometimes provocative, sometimes whimsical, but always reflecting the better way of life.

Music for Worship
By Merrill Bradshaw, Robert P. Manookin, and Reid Nibley
SONOS Music Resources, 32 pp., $3.00

This volume of easy piano pieces was written especially for use of pianists in the auxiliaries of the Church. They are suitable for prelude music, postludes and interludes, and solos in sacrament meeting or family home evening. The composers have written music with dignity, grace, and imagination, with just enough flavor of the contemporary to make the pieces attractive to today’s youth in the Church. Subject matter includes the life of Christ, the Book of Mormon, and Church history.

Making the Most of Yourself
By Sterling W. Sill
Bookcraft, 336 pp., $3.95

In this volume, Sterling W. Sill has assembled fifty-two of his popular Sunday evening radio broadcasts, a year’s week-by-week reading on the advantages of a positive approach to life and its potential.

Stimulating topics invite the reader to explore ideas concerning the successful life, how these ideas may be applied in everyday situations, and how objectives may be achieved through new resolutions. Typical chapter headings are: “A 100-100 Marriage,” “Intelligent Selfishness,” “The Law of Antithesis,” “Sin of Influence,” and “Good Sportsmanship,” all dealing with self-motivation for personal growth.

In this volume, Elder Sill proclaims a philosophy that assures personal achievement through an understanding of readily available spiritual and temporal resources.

Union Pacific Country
By Robert G. Athearn
Rand McNally & Company, 458 pp., illustrated, $15.00

In this unusually detailed account of the Union Pacific rail system as it spanned the continent, the author has utilized Church records and railroad archives to bring together material not previously available for publication.

Of particular interest to Latter-day Saints is the story of the Mormon influence in the expansion of the railroad system, in a new kind of pioneering.

There are many colorful incidents in connection with contract work performed by the Mormons. For instance, when the railroad was slow in payment, President Brigham Young settled in part for rolling stock and equipment that included rails, switches, passenger cars, flatcars, boxcars, and a forty-ton locomotive. This is the kind of reading that will delight readers who feel nostalgia for pre-Amtrack days.

Rediscovery of the Nauvoo Temple
By Virginia S. Harrington and J. C. Harrington
Nauvoo Restoration, Inc. 54 pp., illustrated; $1.75 paperback, $3.50 clothbound.

Reviewed by T. Edgar Lyon, Ph.D., associate director, Salt Lake Institute of Religion, University of Utah

The Nauvoo Temple, demolished more than a century ago, is a never-ending source of interest to thousands of people who visit its site each year. It was erected on the highest point of the bluff rising above the Mississippi River at Nauvoo, Illinois, between 1841 and 1846. Constructed of native gray limestone, it was, when dedicated in May 1846, the largest building west of Cincinnati, Ohio, and north of St. Louis, Missouri.

It served the Church members just a few short months, but through round-the-clock sessions, about 5500 people received their endowments and some sealings prior to the departure of the Saints from Nauvoo in 1846. The temple was fired by an incendiary in 1848 and a cyclone hastened the demolition of the sixty-foot-high stone walls in 1850.

A group of French economic communitarians, known as Icarians, purchased the burned-out temple in 1849 and were engaged in rebuilding it to serve as a community dining hall and meeting center when the effects of the cyclone forced this plan to be abandoned. The Icarians then used some of the cut stone to build a smaller structure on the southwest corner of the temple block, which structure now serves as a museum for temple artifacts and headquarters for the missionaries who interpret the temple story to visitors. Other stones from the temple were used to build the local jail, foundations for Icarian apartments, steps, etc., and others found their way into many of the wine cellars built by the French and German settlers at Nauvoo during post-Mormon times. Some of the ninety unique decorative stones, symbolic of the sun, moon, and stars, were moved as far away as the capitol of Illinois at Springfield.

When most of the stone had been removed from the temple site, the basement depression was refilled with earth. A vineyard was planted, some wine cellars were built, and other buildings dotted the block.

In this condition the once sacred site existed for many years. In 1961–1962 the Southern Illinois University, under contract with the Presiding Bishopric of the Church, excavated most of the site to a depth of five feet, reestablishing the exact location of the walls and some interior partitions.

In 1966 to 1969 Mr. and Mrs. Harrington completed the entire excavation, digging through the ash layers left from the fire of 1848 to the original level of the red-brick floor and the sub floor levels of yellow sand and the unmolested native clay. In this book the Harringtons tell the part of the temple story as far as archaeological evidence makes it possible. Mr. Harrington retired from the National Park Service in 1966 with the highest government rating in the field of historic archaeology and with a most laudatory citation extolling him for new methods he had pioneered and innovated in his chosen specialty. He is recognized as one of the foremost historic archaeologists in the nation. His wife, Virginia, herself a well-trained archaeologist in her own right, spent four summers in Nauvoo directing excavations of old Mormon structures, but concentrating primarily on the temple block.

Rediscovery of the Nauvoo Temple is a carefully researched account of the archaeological excavations of the Nauvoo Temple. The Harringtons have left no stone unturned to make it authentic and descriptive, based on actual, tangible, recovered evidence. The wraparound cover on both the paperback and cloth-bound reports features the Nauvoo Temple baptismal font, drawn by Steven T. Baird, architect for the Nauvoo restoration project. This was the first temple in this dispensation to make use of the Old Testament pattern of the large basin resting on the backs of twelve oxen, which stood outside of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.

Publishers Reviewed

Bookcraft, Inc., 1848 West 23rd South, Salt Lake City, Utah 84119
Nauvoo Restoration, Inc., 10 South Main, Salt Lake City, Utah 84111
Publishers Press, 1848 West 23rd South, Salt Lake City, Utah 84119
Rand McNally & Company, P.O. Box 7600, Chicago, Illinois 60680
SONOS Music Resources, Inc., P.O. Box 1113, Provo, Utah 84601