Donald Q. CannonCritiques

The maps are impressive. They give a greater understanding of the times and what was going on. For example, there is a sequence showing the spread of the religious fervor in the early 1800's.

It looks like a 300 page coffee table book. There is a lot of detail in here. The book does a very good job of giving an overview on many different aspects of the LDS culture and changes over time. I count 96 topics by 60 authors. Each topic is usually covered in 2 pages with some topics getting 4 pages. Given the diversity of the authors, the uniformity of the presentation is impressive. It was nice that the articles are cross-referenced. Fairly often an article will refer to another articles in the volume.

What a thrill to find the floor plan of a meetinghouse on page 163 that matches a building that I helped build! The illustration even shows the expansion that was added long after I left the area.

This is a review of the 2012 edition. A newer edition was published in 2014.