Growing Up in the City of the Saints

This book consists of over 40 memoir vignettes that capture significant learning experiences of identical twin brothers--Gary and Gordon Shepherd--as they grow up in Mormon Salt Lake City during the 1950s and 1960s. Their stories in the first part of the book feature shared adventures with a wide range of friends, family, and adult models who shape the brothers' appreciation for basic American ideals of democracy, equality, diversity, cooperation, and tolerance--especially as taught and modeled in the public schools they attended. Vignette stories in the second part of the book highlight later periods of time in the brothers' lives as they mature and assume adult responsibilities while maintaining and strengthening friendship ties and their youthful core values. Their stories in both parts of the book are peppered with humor, good will, indignation, sadness, and even tragedy but also with rays of hope for the preservation of American ideals in today's troubling times. While the twins' early lives were shaped by the Mormon culture in which they were raised, their memoir writings in this book are far from being devoted exclusively to Mormon or LDS Church topics. A broad audience of readers who enjoy incisively written memoir accounts --even if they grew up elsewhere and in different eras than the Shepherds did--will encounter universal coming of age experiences that resonate with their own.
About the Author: Gordon Shepherd is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Central Arkansas; Gary Shepherd is Professor Emeritus of Sociology Oakland University Michigan. Both brothers were born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. They attended Salt Lake City public Schools and both obtained undergraduate degrees from the University of Utah. Gordon earned a PhD from the State University of New York at Stonybrook while Gary achieved his PhD from Michigan State University. Over the years Gordon and Gary have collaborated extensively on scholarly projects of mutual interest. They are co-authors of Kingdom Transformed: Early Mormonism and the Modern LDS Church (University of Utah Press), Mormon Passage: A Missionary Chronicle (University of Illinois Press), Talking with the Children of God: Prophecy and Reformation in a Radial Religious Group (University of Illinois Press), Binding Earth and Heaven: Patriarchal Blessings in the Patriarchal Development of Early Mormonism (Penn State University Press), Jan Shipps: A Social and Intellectual Portrait (Greg Kofford Books), and co-editors (with Lavina Fielding Anderson) of Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Mormon Feminism (Greg Kofford Books), and (with Ryan Cragun) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism (Palgrave Macmillan).See above joint biography.