| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

*The J. Golden Kimball Stories*. By Eric A. Eliason. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. xviii + 186 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $50.00, cloth; $20.00, paper.)
The J. Golden Kimball Stories is a well-researched, well-rounded exploration of a Mormon folk hero that is not only informative, but engaging. As the author addresses in the preface, the book's topic will undoubtedly attract a wide range of readers, from academics of varied disciplines to individuals from both within and outside the LDS faith drawn by the sharp wit for which J. Golden is known. Confronted by readers with vastly different expectations, Eric A. Eliason has written a book that conscientiously manages to entertain and enlighten.	1
While other books about J. Golden Kimball stories, both popular and academic, have been published, this is the first to carefully distinguish between the Kimball of history—his sermons—and the J. Golden of the popular legend cycle—the oral narrative—while at the same time convincingly maintaining that the two are not necessarily always distinct. Eliason persuades his audiences that history and folklore as they surround this western legend are not competing, but cooperating methodologies that work together to "illuminate how people in the present use and make sense of the past in daily life" (p. 8). This book is a solid piece of folklore scholarship that aims to get readers to ask the central question: "What do J. Golden Kimball stories reveal about Mormons" (p. 51)?	. . .

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