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Show WINTER 2013 UHQ pp 91-104_UHQ BReviews/pp.271-296 12/5/12 9:50 AM Page 97 BOOK REVIEWS To the Peripheries of Mormondom:The Apostolic Around-the-World Journey of David O. McKay, 1920-1921. By Hugh J. Cannon, edited by Reid L. Neilson. (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2011. xxxii + 244 pp. Cloth, $29.95.) “COME WITH US . . . on our trip around the world,” invites Salt Lake City stake president Hugh J. Cannon as he begins the tale of his and Latterday Saint Church Apostle David O. McKay’s 366-day journey crisscrossing the globe studying the “spiritual and, as far as possible, temporal needs” of Church membership while seeking to “ascertain the effects of ‘Mormonism’ upon their lives” (1). More than nine decades after their adventure, Cannon’s account of the journey comes to life in Reid L. Neilson’s edited account, To the Peripheries of Mormondon: The Apostolic Around-the-World Journey of David O. McKay, 1920-1921. Winner of the Mormon History Association’s Geraldine McBride Woodward Best International Book Award for 2012, the book chronicles the mission of McKay and Cannon as they “traveled a total of 61,646 miles not counting trips made by auto, streetcars, tugs, ferry boats, horseback, camels etc.” (154). To the Peripheries of Mormondom recounts their meetings with missionaries and members in Japan, Hawaii, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Australia, the Middle East, and Europe as well as experiences touring the mystical lands of China, Singapore, India, and Egypt. Highlights include McKay’s dedicating the country of China for the preaching of the gospel and the pair’s walking in the footsteps of the Savior in the Holy Land. Cannon’s original text, authored shortly after the mission but never published in his or McKay’s lifetime, is augmented by Neilson’s skilled editorial hand. His light editing preserves the account’s devotional tone, while his sixty-eight page introductory and photographic essay and sixty-three pages of endnotes add flavor and scholastic insight. Drawing from his expertise as a leading historian of global Mormonism as well as his knowledge of sources as managing director of the Church History Department for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Neilson’s additions clarify cultural and geographic terms, introduce prominent characters, and enliven the account with material from McKay’s personal writings. These scholarly additions enhance the engaging narrative previously published by Cannon’s children as David O. McKay Around the World: An Apostolic Mission, Prelude to Church Globalization (2005). While at its most basic level, To the Peripheries of Mormondom is a travelogue, Cannon and Neilson both repeatedly seek a higher purpose for their text. Cannon openly admits “the impelling motive in writing an account of this tour is to bear witness of the goodness of the Lord to those who depend upon him” (34). True to this purpose, Cannon’s narrative wanders 97 |
