Book Notices

Later Patriarchal Blessings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

By H. Michael Marquardt. (Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2012. liv + 591 pp.Cloth, $90.00.)

This book contains the text of eight hundred patriarchal blessings given to members of the LDS church between the 1830s and 1980s. These blessings, unique to Mormonism, are important rituals meant to bolster faith and give prophetic guidance; scribes write them down and the church keeps copies. The volume includes blessings given to well-known and lesser-known people in Utah history. The introduction discusses the office of the patriarch and gives a detailed account of the controversial appointment and term of the last church-wide patriarch, Eldred Smith.

The Avenues. Images of America Series.

By Cevan LeSieur.(Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2012. 127 pp. Paper, $21.99.)

Historic photographs of the buildings and people of Salt Lake City’s Avenues fill the pages of this book. Along with a chapter on the architecturally eclectic houses of the neighborhood, there are chapters about construction projects, places of worship and learning, apartment buildings, and public buildings.

The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.

By EdwardJ. Blum and Paul Harvey. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 340 pp.Cloth, $32.50.)

This groundbreaking book argues that the color of Christ in American art has had—and does have—significant political and social implications: Jesus’s race has been involved in slavery, struggles for emancipation, Native peoples’ struggles with whites, KKK activities, civil rights, immigration issues, warfare, and more. The authors state that the “color of Christ” provides a compelling way to grasp the meaning of religion and race in American history. They discuss the Mormon views of Christ vis-àvis Mormons’ attitudes toward race. They also suggest that Mormon view of Christ might also have been influenced by the fact that Mormon whiteness was at times under attack. (One person described the children of polygamists as members of a degraded new race.) Perhaps because of such persecution, early Mormons became committed to the “whiteness” of Jesus, and hence their own.