| OCR Text |
Show WINTER 2013 UHQ pp 91-104_UHQ BReviews/pp.271-296 12/5/12 9:50 AM Page 99 BOOK REVIEWS precisely detailed as some readers would want. (For example, I had to look elsewhere to find Peterson’s exact birth date.) But such a focus is not Peterson’s primary objective. The book, he writes, “is a collection of stories that shed light on my particular human and spiritual journey” (xvi). “The stories I have chosen to record in a memoir,” he later adds, “may have the purpose, in part, of pushing back the evening of growing darkness while shining a small light on life as it is” (285). Peterson thus conducts readers through the lives and impact of his forebears and especially parents; from a halcyon youth in Logan,where his father presided for twenty-nine years over Utah State Agricultural College (later Utah State University) to a heady, privileged education at a New England preparatory school; then to Harvard and back to Utah where he practiced medicine in Salt Lake City. In 1967, he returned to Harvard as Dean of Admissions and in 1971 was named a vice-president. In 1978, he jour neyed back to Utah as Vice-President for Health Sciences at the University of Utah, and five years later was appointed university president, a position he held until 1991. Following his resignation, he took up medicine again and in the late 1990s was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a bone-marrow cancer. He chose to pursue both traditional and experimental treatments, and despite some difficult periods, including bouts of post-traumatic stress and anxiety, has lived well beyond the three to four years that were originally predicted. Peterson is a gentle, self-effacing memoirist, and the unpretentious nature of his narrative occasionally serves to highlight the limits of autobiography. Readers will not find much in the way of a critical, probing in-depth analysis of Peterson’s life. Largely, but not entirely, absent is any attempt to weigh carefully the various aspects of Peterson’s character, personality, and intellect that have contributed to his successes and missteps. (An exception may be his account of his involvement in the “Cold Fusion” controversy at the University of Utah.) For example, Peterson downplays his extraordinary admission as an extremely precocious teenager to the prestigious Middlesex College school; he glosses without much comment over his rise as a popular student leader; and presents himself as similarly oblivious of the importance of his acceptance into Harvard and later into Harvard’s medical school. Clearly, there is more to Peterson than appears on the pages of his autobiography. While readers (myself among them) applaud his humility, I am left to wonder how best to account satisfactorily for the nature and scope of his accomplishments. Peterson is also generous almost to a fault; rarely, if ever, does he offer criticisms of his colleagues and acquaintances. And when he does, he seems always to couch them in ways that could also be read as compliments. For example, he notes that colorful basketball coach Rick Majerus was known for a “coarse midwestern tongue”–a euphemism for the coach’s use of profanity–and was “almost incapable of being managed” (203). Even so, 99 |
