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David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. By Gregory A. Prince and Wm. Robert Wright. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2005. xx + 491 pp. $29.95 cloth.
Prince and Wright, both LDS church members, one the CEO of a business and author of several publications in Mormon history and the other a retired attorney who inherited his aunt's papers, have collaborated in the project of creating a portrait of David O. McKay, the mid-twentieth-century President of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. The foundations for their portrait are McKay's papers and diaries, collected by Clare Middlemiss, McKay's personal secretary for most of his years in office, first as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve and later as President. Through these personal records, they view the developments of the LDS Church from the turn of the century until 1970 when McKay died. They credit McKay with guiding the Church from its beginnings as a "parochial Great Basin organization into a respected worldwide religion" (1).
Instead of presenting a chronological account of McKay's career, Prince and Wright chose a number of issues that faced the Latter-day Saints during the course of the twentieth century, among them, the nature of revelation and prophecy, the...