num_pages: 233
description: Bruder may be the best missionary memoir ever. I’ve read every one I could find, and this compelling volume is the best I’ve found. I like the vividness with which Terry lays out the day-to-day realities of missionary experience like a smorgasbord for those who haven’t yet tasted it, and even more appetizingly for those of us who thought we already had. I like the illumination of the book’s double-barreled perspective. The before-and-after portraits of the mature narrator looking back on Bruder Terry struggling through his missionary traumas and triumphs illuminate profound insights into the practical workings as well as the wonders of the missionary world. The themes of the book—the vicissitudes of personal revelation, the struggles to rescue fallen humanity (including one’s own), the girl-I-left-behind-me angst—are as life-changing as a lived mission. Roger Terry’s engaging voice ushers us so far in to the immediate experience of being a missionary we almost become part of the topography, here so flat “you can stand on a tuna can and see the back of your head.” I’ve been on a mission, and I don’t know a better way to go on one than to read The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary.—Steve Walker, professor emeritus of English, Brigham Young University
title: Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary
publisher: By Common Consent Press