Leisure reading

'A Voice in the Wilderness'

Edited by Michael Austin

USU Press, $19.95 (softcover).

This new book contains several conversations with Terry Tempest Williams, Utah's own writer and environmentalist, who has attained national fame for her books and other writings. She was interviewed by a variety of publications and radio programs from 1991-2005.

An unorthodox LDS writer, Williams has given lectures all over the country, but she lives in Utah's red-rock country, which she loves. Michael Austin, the editor of this work, tells in the introduction how hard he worked to find and collect interviews with Williams. Eventually he found 40 interviews, providing hundreds of pages of text, and many hours of radio recordings.

Austin selected 16 of those interviews to be published in this interesting collection. — Dennis Lythgoe

'Passionaries'

By Barbara R. Metzler

Temple Foundation Press, $19.95 (softcover).

This interesting book presents profiles of 35 people who have spent a large portion of their lives in compassionate service somewhere in the world.

They range in age from 6 to 89. Some are physically challenged, and some are former prisoners. Some are working through emotional pain. Some are well know.

The author also tells about a number of organizations that perform regular service: USA Harvest, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Ronald McDonald, House Charities and Habitat for Humanity, to name a few.

The message intended here is that "one person can make a difference." — Dennis Lythgoe

'There Goes the Neighborhood'

By William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub

Knopf, $23.95.

This book, subtitled "Racial, Ethnic and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America," is written to stir thinking about matters presumed to have been solved.

William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub are professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, and they wanted to present some shocking truths about the nature of class in America.

The major conclusion they offer here is that "the American dream of racial integration, 42 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, still eludes us — and, in fact, may not happen in the foreseeable future." — Dennis Lythgoe