As the 7th feature of our Mormon Stories Book Club series, we feature Michael Hicks and his book The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book, accompanied by podcast host Heather Olson Beal and readers Mark Brown and Jonathan Yarrington.  Please support Mormon Stories by purchasing The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book through this link.  A small amount of the proceeds go to help support Mormon Stories.

Michael Hicks, a composer, performer, scholar, and poet, has been teaching in the BYU School of Music since 1985.  For more biographical information about Michael, see here  and here.

==============

Title: The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book
Author: Michael Hicks
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Genre: Non-fiction
Year: 2012
Pages: 504
Binding: Paperback, Kindle
ISBN-13: 1477615830
Price: $17.25 (paperback), $6.99 (Kindle)

Book Description from www.amazon.com:

Not a “simplified” version of the Book of Mormon, but a completely rewritten paraphrase, with a contemporary voice hovering somewhere in the realm of J. D. Salinger, Hunter Thompson, and some generic humanist academic/poet, i.e., me. An affectionate, meditational dramatization and commentary. From the Introduction: “Why ‘street-legal’? That’s a term we use for souped-up cars—streamlined and powerfully efficient but also decorative, with decals, pinstriping, and tricked-out doodads—that still can be ridden in normal lanes of traffic. They’re not cars meant for everyday errands, to be sure. Offroad is their normal habitat. But the only thing they usually lack to be ‘normal’ is a better muffler. This paraphrase of the Book of Mormon is like that. I’ve streamlined a lot of passages, put them in terse, up-to-date vernacular, thinking that’s what one would have done if one were scratching the book out on metal plates. I’ve tried to muscle up the prose. But I’ve also added lots of linguistic decals: digressions, snippets of commentary, queries, and even humor, which the original editor, Mormon, apparently cut.”

In March 2013, the Association for Mormon Letters gave the book the “first ever award for adaption from a modern language into a more modern language.”

Book Club Resources:

1. Reviews of The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book
2. https://www.dovesandserpents.org/wp/2013/04/a-street-legal-version-of-the-beatitudes/
3. Video resources:
   1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-3YCdjNz64
   2. https://www.mormonchannel.org/legacy/60
4. Other Bloggernacle resources/writings by and about Hicks
   1. https://bycommonconsent.com/2008/07/01/early-mormon-hymn-singing/
   2. https://www.dovesandserpents.org/wp/?s=Michael+Hicks
   3. https://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/jbms/?vol=21&num=1&id=635