Book Review: Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet

Keywords

Brigham Young, LDS Prophet, Latter-Day Saints, Pioneer, Prophet

Abstract

John Turner deserves praise for crafting a captivating account of one of the nineteenth century’s most controversial, well-documented Americans. His Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet arranges a staggering swath of archival and scholarly materials into an engaging, moderate narrative that stands with Leonard Arrington’s celebrated Brigham Young: American Moses as indispensable biographies of the legendary Mormon leader. The sheer magnitude of Turner’s archival and historiographical task pushed him into a synthetic mode that renders the work more descriptive than interpretive in many respects. He spends most of his space carefully piecing together Young’s remarkably complicated life. In this, Turner unquestionably succeeds. Given the polarized accounts of Young, his own inconsistencies, and the documentary labyrinths related to him, this was no small feat

Original Publication Citation

Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, by John G. Turner, in Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 1 (February 2014): 133-34.

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2014-2

Permanent URL

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/6385

Publisher

Pacific Historical Review

Language

English

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

History

University Standing at Time of Publication

Associate Professor

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