A May Bouquet

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Derived from the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald Redford's "The Ancient Gods Speak: A Guide to Egyptian Religion" offers more than 90 articles explaining various features of ancient Egyptian beliefs, including ideas about death and the afterlife, the role of cultic animals and the pantheon of deities. The tone can be dry at times, and one wishes for more illustrations, but serious readers will learn a great deal about this ancient religion.

This collection of nine critical essays on the Book of Mormon generally evinces strong scholarship and compelling argumentation, though some of the articles are clearly superior to others. The anthology begins notably well, with Edwin Firmage Jr.'s autobiographical essay on historical criticism and the Book of Mormon. George Smith's article on early 20th-century LDS leader Brigham H. Roberts is also outstanding, documenting how Roberts publicly championed the Book of Mormon but privately experienced misgivings about its authenticity as an ancient text. Susan Staker's "Secret Things, Hidden Things" is the most innovative and fresh essay in the bunch, delving into the role of seership in the book and in Joseph Smith's life. Finally, David Wright's investigation into the Book of Mormon's many Isaiah passages an important, if highly technical, study.

Other pieces are not as strong. Vogel's study of the conflicting accounts of the 19th-century witnesses who claimed to have seen or touched the original plates of the Book of Mormon begins promisingly enough, but ends with the disappointing and reductive assertion that these individuals were probably victims of hypnosis and group hallucination. Scott Dunn's essay, Automaticity and the Dictation of the Book of Mormon, is also a weak link, applying 1970s-era research on automatic writing (a phenomenon that many scholars and psychologists have dismissed) to Joseph Smith's purported translation of the Book of Mormon. On the whole, however, this anthology enlivens the debate about the origin and importance of the Book of Mormon.

This story of one woman's journey from evangelical Christianity to Orthodox Judaism is intriguing and loving. She's now Tova Mordechai, but she began as Tonica Marlow, the British daughter of a Pentecostal preacher father and an Egyptian Jewish mother (who herself had become a Christian).

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