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Hugh Nibley "A Consecrated Life"
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 By Boyd Jay PetersenForeword written by Zina Nibley Petersen As one of the LDS Church's most widely recognized scholars, Hugh Nibley is both an icon and an enigma. Through complete access to Nibley's correspondence, journals, notes and papers, Petersen has painted a portrait that reveals the man behind the legend. Starting with a foreword written by Zina Nibley Peterson (the author's wife and Nibley's daughter) and finishing with appendixes that include some of the best of Nibley's personal correspondence, the biography reveals aspects of the tapestry of the life of one who has truly consecrated his life to the service of the Lord. Boyd Petersen is currently a doctoral candidate in comparative literature and Hebrew bible at the University of Utah. Early acclaim for Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life Hugh Nibley is generally touted as one of Mormonism's greatest minds and perhaps its most prolific scholarly apologist. Just as hefty as some of Nibley's largest tomes, this authorized biography is delightfully accessible and full of the scholar's delicious wordplay and wit, not to mention some astonishing war stories and insights into Nibley's phenomenal acquisition of languages. Introduced by a personable foreword from the author's wife (who is Nibley's daughter), the book is written with enthusiasm, respect and insight. It is organized into chapters alternating between chronological biography (childhood, mission to Germany, military service in WWII, ect.) and topical themes in Nibley's life (social criticism, faith, scholarship, Scripture and so on). A particularly powerful and timely chapter addresses Nibley's rather surprising views on war; he was opposed to the Vietnam War when it was very unpopular in LDS culture to do so. Although this format often results in repeated information, it also makes it easy to approach the book as a collection of stand-alone essays. Occasionally the author falls into the archival researcher's trap of including unnecessary information simply because he has access to it, but on the whole Petersen is a careful scholar who provides helpful historical context. Although Petersen married into Nibley's family, and sometimes defends Nibley and his inconsistencies from his many critics, this project is far from hagiography. It fills an important gap in LDS history and will appeal to a wide Mormon audience. -- Publishers Weekly, 12/23/02 pg. 65 For the Defense: The Life of Hugh Winder Nibley Boyd Petersen, Hugh Nibley's biographer, is also his son-in-law. And he's my friend. This past August, I e-mailed Boyd, asking for some help on an assignment I was preparing for my freshman writing class at BYU. I wanted to send my students on a sort of footnote scavenger hunt in the Harold B. Lee Library. Their job would be to take a few well-annotated pages from any book and check the actual sources to see how the book's author had used or abused those sources. Could he recommend any books or articles? Boyd wrote back, "I have a couple of suggestions. One, [Hugh's] talk 'Leaders to Managers: The Fatal Shift' has a couple of misrepresented quotes in it from Brigham Young." Boyd has always spoken his mind, but his suggestion surprised me. I'd heard that Nibley sometimes got it wrong, but I never expected to hear it from his son-in-law. Nevertheless, I checked the quotes against the Journal of Discourses, the original source, and sure enough, Boyd was right: His father-in-law got it wrong--at least that time. Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life, on the other hand, got it right. No hagiography, Nibley's authorized biography is a balanced and thoroughly engrossing tale of Mormonism's gadfly scholar by someone willing to rummage though the closets without losing sight of the spectacular view. Take those Brigham Young quotes, for example. Petersen's book explains how errors like that could creep in. According to Gordon Thomasson, Nibley's graduate research assistant, they were once in the "cage" of the Church Historian's office studying the original volumes of Brigham Young's manuscript, filling out a 3x5 note card anytime they found something interesting. To avoid the possibility that A. William Lund, senior assistant church historian, might confiscate any of their notes, Nibley asked Thomasson to take "accurate but indecipherable word for word notes." Thomasson, in turn, suggested that they use the "Spanish equivalents for English words but writing them using the Greek alphabet." As Petersen explains, that was fine with Hugh because he had "always done his own notes in Gregg shorthand, with assorted Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, or Egyptian notes thrown in." Once again, Petersen balances the account: Lund was only doing his job. Quoting Thomasson, "No one else was going to embarrass the Church by exploiting the Historian's office as Fawn Brodie had done, if Lund had anything to do with it . . . Neither of us enjoyed the subterfuge. That was simply a reality of working there." If you're a Nibliophile like I am, you've been waiting for this book ever since you read his short autobiographical essay, "An Intellectual Autobiography," published in 1978. Who is this man behind all these essays and books--half text, half footnotes? What's the real story behind the briefcase he acquired during World War II? Did he really ask Phyllis to marry him the first time he met her? And most importantly, is the private man any different from the public one? The answers to the last two questions are no and no. You'll have to read the book to answer the first two. Organized in alternating chronological and topical chapters, Petersen's book covers Nibley's life and contributions, starting in 1810 in Scotland with Hugh's great-grand parents, James and Jean Nibley and ending with Nibley finally turning over chapters of his last baby, One Eternal Round, to his editor. (Until recently, this 92-year-old scholar and defender of his faith put in three to four hours in his office each weekday.) The book's topical chapters cover Nibley's roles as social critic, naturalist, and educator. They tell of his faith and his defense of The Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price. They reveal a man as opposed to war and as he is in love with the Temple. Petersen drew extensively on interviews, private correspondence, journals, and other never-before published materials, in addition to Nibley's large corpus of published writings, to tell the story of this extraordinary man. We read from a letter from Klaus Baer to the Tanners that Nibley's "articles in [the Improvement Era on the Book of Abraham] hit very close to home if you know something about the field." We learn from a letter from Spencer W. Kimball to his wife, Camille, that "we are fortunate to have such men of his scholarly attainments and sweet faith in our University." But best of all, we discover from his correspondence with his son Alex that this very public defender of his faith also bore frequent testimony of its truthfulness in private. For example, quoting Brigham Young, he writes Alex, "'Tell the Saints to get the Spirit of the Lord,' and 'Don't be in a hurry.' On the few occasions when I have been willing to take that advice seriously I have flourished like the green bay tree--the rest of the time has been a struggle, and no need for it." This man is not the conflicted scholar some have maintained, a man playing mind games with the faithful even as he fought battles in his own mind over his own faith. This man believed what he wrote and wrote what he believed. Well written and thoroughly researched, Petersen's biography is a must have for anyone struggling to reconcile faith and reason. For Nibliophiles, it should stand at the top of their wish list. (By the way, the book's forward written by Nibley's daughter and Boyd's wife, Zina Nibley Petersen, is alone worth the price of the book. Among the many vignettes of Nibley family life she relates is the one where she remembers--in high school—calling herself a "daughter of a false god," in reference to her father's fawning groupies. "I think this is funny," she continues. "I think if I told it to the groupies sitting at Daddy's knees they would not get it.") I think I got it. -- Greg Taggart, Association for Mormon Letters (AML) ISBN 1-58958-019-2 Limited Edition Leather $159.95 1-58958-020-6 Hardcover $32.95 |
Hugh Nibley in the News More Reviews Audio Clip Excerpts from the book: Title.pdf TOC.pdf Preface.pdf Foreword.pdf Introduction.pdf Chapter 1.pdf Chapter 2.pdf Chapter 3.pdf Chapter 4.pdf Chapter 5.pdf Chapter 6.pdf Chapter 7.pdf Chapter 8.pdf Chapter 9.pdf Chapter 10.pdf Chapter 11.pdf Chapter 12.pdf Chapter 13.pdf Chapter 14.pdf Chapter 15.pdf Chapter 16.pdf Chapter 17.pdf Chapter 18.pdf Chapter 19.pdf Chapter 20.pdf Chapter 21.pdf Chapter 22.pdf Chapter 23.pdf Chapter 24.pdf Chapter 25.pdf Chapter 26.pdf Appendix A.pdf Appendix B.pdf Appendix C.pdf Appendix D.pdf Appendix E.pdf Index.pdf |
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