It is difficult not to like Leonard Arrington. By all accounts, he was an exceptionally generous and decent man. His Great Basin Kingdom was a kind of Big Bang of Mormon historiography, doing more than any other volume to create the New Mormon History. In addition, Arrington was an enormously productive researcher and scholarly entrepreneur, churning out articles and monographs at a prodigious rate and helping to found such institutions as the Mormon History Association and the Journal of

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... History. Finally, he was a mentor of rare abilities, indentifying, encouraging, and supporting dozens of junior scholars who went on to make major contributions to our understanding of the Mormon past. Not surprisingly, Garry Topping's generous-even at times hagiographic-biography is sure to please those who remember Leonard personally. In recounting Arrington's intellectual and professional career, however, the book also provides a useful moment of ref lection on the turbulent world of Mormon studies in the last decades of the twentieth century. With one exception, Arrington's life was largely devoid of the kind of drama that makes for a page-turning biography. Reading the book, I was reminded of a comment by William Blackstone's most recent biographer. Blackstone was the first university professor of English law; and through his four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England, he had an enormous inf luence on the development of law in the United States and Britain. Nevertheless, his biographer observes, "Blackstone's relatively short lifespan was not saturated with drama or sensation." 1 The same could be said of Arrington's much longer life. With the exception of his dramatic tenure as Church Historian, what excitement there was in Leonard Arrington's life lies in the story of his intellectual career and his contribution to the scholarly study of Mormonism. Arrington was first and foremost an economic historian, and Topping does a workmanlike job of running down the inf luences on Arrington's early thought. The book, unfortunately, makes little or no attempt to place Arrington's intellectual training in the broader history of eco-