To every man, said the poet, there opens a high way and a low. The choice is rarely easy - the higher way often involves sacrifice, a new and unfamiliar life, the renouncing of old habits. But once the divine urge to improve swells up in the soul, for the higher spirit only the higher way is possible. Thus it was with J. Golden Kimball, son of the pioneer leader and prophet Heber C. Kimball. Left fatherless at fifteen, and thereafter virtually without external restraint, he gravitated to occupations whose rough life might well have made him oblivious to things of the Spirit. But when he reached the age of twenty-eight, the higher way opened as, under the spell of the great Karl G. Maeser's inspired words, he glimpsed the vision of what education and gospel development could offer. In that moment of opportunity, heredity and childhood training asserted themselves, and ambition caught fire. Henceforth only the higher way was acceptable. The brief biographical account in this book sketches simply but effectively the results of J. Golden's choice - such as study at the Brigham Young Academy, the filling of two missions in the South (one as mission president), and forty-six years' service as a member of the First Council of the Seventy. But perhaps the results are best disclosed by the anecdotes, sayings, and speeches which form the major part of this book. They reveal a man of the people - warm, compassionate, human - yet of a highly original and independent personality. Punctuating his remarks with homely stories, recollections of his illustrious father, and faith-promoting or otherwise illustrative personal experiences, he expressed himself not with a classic or studied eloquence but in plain, down-to-earth terms understood by all. His natural gift for dry humor, one of the characteristics for which he is fondly remembered, comes through in this selection of his talks. Appropriate when given, they similarly have a timely appeal today. "I write books," quipped J. Golden Kimball, "but I put them in pigeonholes and lock them up where they can't do any damage." Like the rest of us, however, by his actions he wrote one book he could not pigeonhole - his book of life. The consensus is that he wrote this record well. The spirit and tone of that enduring and endearing chronicle are captured in this reprint of Claude Richard's book, J. Golden Kimball. (taken from dust jacket).