Biographies shed light on popular LDS leader

DAVID O. McKAY AND THE RISE OF MODERN MORMONISM, by Gregory A. Prince and William Robert Wright, The University of Utah Press, 472 pages, $29.95, hardcover; DAVID O. McKAY: BELOVED PROPHET, by Mary Jane Woodger, Covenant, 271 pages, $16.95, softcover.

As astounding as it seems, there has never been a satisfactory biography of David O. McKay, who was in many ways the most charismatic LDS president since Joseph Smith.

McKay, who was tall, athletic and handsome, with thick, wavy white hair, is the one Mormon prophet who has been commonly thought to have "looked like a prophet."

Moreover, in a lengthy tenure as an LDS apostle beginning when he was 32 and lasting until he died at 96, McKay made a huge impact on the church's growth — with his own determination to make Mormonism "an international church." By the time he died, McKay was the only church president that two out of of three Mormons had ever known.

In "David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism," a scholarly treatment that often seems more like a doctoral dissertation than a conventional biography, Greg Prince has made an extraordinary contribution in the first legitimate attempt to tell McKay's fascinating story.

Co-author William Robert Wright was the nephew and confidante of Clare Middlemiss, 35-year personal secretary to McKay both as an apostle and as LDS Church president.

Middlemiss, an effective and confident woman who acted more as a chief of staff than a secretary, was also the keeper of his diary, letters, scrapbooks and other documents. She must be praised for keeping an unrivaled historical cache that provides probably more information than has been available about any modern LDS leader.

Wright merely acted as a critic for Prince, who wrote the book. Hence, his title of co-author seems disingenuous. While Prince is unusually well-educated and is a Mormon history buff with an incomparable personal LDS library, his training in dentistry and medical research do not suit him well for the analytical work of historian.

The book suffers from the use of huge, undigested quotations from McKay and a number of church leaders and associates. A trained historian would have pared down the material, done some paraphrasing and devoted precious time to analyzing the evidence.

Instead, Prince just lays it out in lengthy chapters, each of which starts over again chronologically, making the narrative jarring and sometimes confusing.

Still, there is a huge and interesting body of material here that will be fascinating to both general readers and historians and surely will lead to other biographies that improve on this one.