mons had already chosen a place to re-
settle. The town was called Commerce,
so they bought it. Smith changed the
name to Nauvoo, which he believed to
be the Hebrew word for "beautiful city.."T
he city of Nauvoo took shape in
an age when Ralph Waldo Emer-
son claimed that every intdlectual had
'"a draft of a new community in his waist-
coat pocket." But Smith's plans went
far beyond the scribbling stage: within
a do7.en years ofits founding, the Church
of]esus Christ of Latter-day Saints had
more than twenty thousand members,
and Nauvoo quickly grew to be more
populous than Chicago. But, un1ikc the
Windy City, Nauvoo, operating under
a permissive charter from the state of
Illinois, developed a distinctly theo-
cratic character: its independent judi-
ciary could deny the validity of arrest
warrants issued by neighboring authori-
ties in order to shield Church members
from prosecution, and its standing militia
of several hundred armed men, known
as the Nauvoo Legion, was empowered
to protect citizens .from any threat. Smith
was made a Lieutenant General, a title
previously held in the United States
only by George Washington, and orga-
nized parades to show off the legion's
strength. (This was the military expe-
rience he would boast about during his
Presidential campaign; he later added
to his rCsume a term as Nauvoo's mayor.)
The city's grandest feature was its
enormous tabernacle. Smith wanted the
temple of Nauvoo to rival the one built
by Solomon; when it was finished, thanks
to the tithe in time and muscle required
of every resident, it was twice as tall as
the White House. Smith had continued
to receive revelations about how the
faithful were meant to serve God, so this
new sanctuary housed new religious rit-
uals. One of them called for posthumous
baptism, through which Mormons could
baptize a living person as a proxy for
someone already deceased. Another--
which would divide the Church, attract
the permanent suspicion of the state,
and forever taint the public perception
of the faith-called for plural marriage.
The origins of this rite are not well
known. As Park observes in "Kingdom
ofNauvoo," it is striking that a faith so
devoted to record-keeping did not doc-
ument the doctrine of polygamy. "As
&LUEFLOWERSCARO(-A
SAAVEDRABR.IEFLY NOTED
R•nl C...d•Nlla, by.Adam H«hschild (Houghton Mifflin Har-
court). This vibrant biography portrays the riveting charisma
of the socialist activist Rose Pastor Stokes. A Russian-Jew-
ish immigrant and a cigar-factory worker, Pastor Stokes be-
came an overnight celebrity when, in 1905, she married into
one of the nation's wealthiest families. For the next :fifteen
~ years, she was a tireless crusader for workers' and women's
rights, fighting to decriminalize birth control. She also hosted
a stream of socialist lumirwies, including W. E. B. Du Bois
and Maxim Gorky, on her private island. Moving between
glittering estates and squalid tenements, Hochschild cap-
tures the improbability and idealism of both Pastor Stokes
and her era, a time when it seemed that stark divisions of
class, race, and gender might be erased, in an instant, by love.v.llow Bini, by Siem: Crane Murdoch (Random House). In.WU,
at the height of the North Dakota oil boom, a young white
truck driver working in the oil fields disappeared from the
Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The case seemed fated to
languish unsolved, but it found a champion in Lissa Yellow
Bird, an obsessive amateur detective. Yell.ow Bird-a mem-
ber of the Mandan, Hi.datsa, and Arikara Nati.on, a recover-
ing addict, a former prison guard, an ex-convict, and a mother
of five--uncovered the truth with impressive persistence and
guile. Murdoch's sprawling narrative explores the woman's
past, the terrible history of America's treatment of indige-
nous peoples, and the impact of sudden wealth on a place
that has suffered decades of deprivation and mismanagement.Ltttle Gacia, hy Meng fin {Custom House). This debut novel
begins on the eve of the T"iananmen crackdown, in 1989, with
the birth of a baby girl. Her parents, a physicist and a doc-
tor in Shanghai, are upwardly mobile transplants from a
neighboring province, whose lives are soon tossed into chaos.
Told from three perspectives, including that of a young Amer-
ican who travels to China to trace her mother's life, the book
is populated by stubborn characters who are balancing on
thin wires of ambition or nostalgia. As the narratives merge,
tying together history and the present, J.i.c:'s richly textured,
unsparing writing questions whether a self can exist un-
marked by the past.Blue Flowers, hy Carola Sflll'lJUira, translated from the Purtu-
guese hy Daniel Hahn (!O'rJt!T'head). One winter day, a resent-
ful, recently divorced man receives a letter from a mysteri-
ous woman, who signs the missive with "A." It's a mistake:
the intended recipient, A.'s cx:-lovei; was the previous tenant
of the man's apartment. Letters continue to arrive, and the
man becomes fixated on A.'s passionate meditations about
her relationship's end and the web of tenderness, hostility,
and submission in which it has left her. He halts his normal
life to find her, and Saavedra, a lauded Brazilian writer, twists
this search deftly. As A's correspondence unfolds, it explores
language's insufficiencies, and its power: "This letter will be
opened, and all the world that it contains will open, too."