Family Kingdom [Hardcover]

Samuel W. Taylor (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Zion Book Store (June 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0914740148
• ISBN-13: 978-0914740148
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,304,132 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Printed on jacket flap:, September 20, 2007

By 

greenwinter - See all my reviews

This review is from: Family Kingdom (Hardcover)

"This is the true story of a woman who hitched a wild ride for time and eternity with a human rocket - an incredible and moving account of a Mormon family and its fight through heartbreak and laughter for an outlawed way of life.
John Taylor, the author's father, was in his way one of this country's really remarkable men. He was a Mormon and an Apostle of the Church in Utah at a time when the principle of plural marriage was going out of favor with the Church. In addition to Nettie May, the author's mother, John married five other women, had thirty-six children, and still managed to remain a heroic, beloved figure to all of them throughout his entire life. Each of the six wives lived secure in the knowledge that she was his favorite and each believed herself immensely priveleged to share, even briefly, the life of a prophet.
A magnetic, forceful, tremendously enthusiastic man, John Taylor lived through a time of change and refused to bend. When the Church abolished the practice of polygamy, he didn't. Holding fast to 'the law of Abraham,' he took three more wives and was dropped from the Church for doing so.
Nettie May knew that entering plural marriage with John meant taking on a lifetime of insecurity. For seven years after her marriage she couldn't even admit that she was married, although she had borne her husband three children. As politics changed, she was alternately a child-producing 'widow' on the underground and one of the elite of Mormondom as the respected wife of an Apostle. She had married a plunger and a speculator who even without the uncertainty of the times would have given her a chaotic married life. John's grand-scale schemes ranged from land speculation in Canada and the Utah desert to gold mining in Mexico and wild gambles on such unlikely inventions as a rungless ladder. He made fortunes one month and lost them the next. But Nettie May had a wonderful and breathless ride on the coattails of John W. Taylor in a life that was at best precarious, at worst never dull.
FAMILY KINGDOM tells a story that is highly unusual to say the least, and tremendously interesting. It is filled with the warmth and humor of a big family that stuck together in spirit no matter how hot the persecution or how far they were physically separated. Both as an unusual and absorbing story and as a unique contribution to a little-known side of American history, FAMILY KINGDOM is an important and extremely rewarding book."