Widmer, a Canadian-born academic, has produced a study of Mormonism and its mission to Germany which was accepted as a doctoral dissertation by the Humboldt University in Berlin. The author admits that he can only provide ‘generalisations’ (p. 247). He manages to cover the history of Mormonism in the Federal Republic in less than two pages. The history of the sect in the GDR gets just under seven pages allotted to it. Even here the originality and value of Widmer's remarks can be doubted. He claims, for example, that Mormon ideals resembled those of socialism (pp. 326, 328) and that the group was therefore perceived as a threat in Wilhelmine Germany. Yet the SED strangely privileged the group by crucially allowing a temple to be built in the GDR. Interesting points such as the Nazis’ use of Mormon referees at basketball games during the Berlin Olympics (pp. 191, 340) remain passing references because, as Widmer believes (pp. 265, 338), the archival sources are lacking. Just ten pages are devoted to the Third Reich though Mormon ‘racial policy’ (p. 29) and support for population controls (p. 288) – more generally, the originally racist theology of the group – must surely have been of great interest to the National Socialists. And what about the Masonic links of many of the founders and the Masonic-style temple rituals? Freemasons were, after all, persecuted by the Nazi regime and banned in the GDR. The question why the two German dictatorships provided preferential treatment to a millenarian American sect that was overtly seeking to establish a political theocracy on earth is hardly even addressed, let alone answered. Conflicting membership numbers are referenced at various places throughout this repetitive and tedious study. Widmer does not even attempt to contextualise or relate Mormonism to the growing historiography of non-mainstream, free churches in Germany. In spite of its bulk this study provides few insights. The writer makes numerous elementary spelling errors in English. At one place he speaks of ‘believers in Chris’ (p. 130). The book includes variant spellings of a number of names. Truly astonishing is the writer's inability to use commas and apostrophes correctly. The bibliography and German quotations in the text reveal a very poor grasp of German. In addition, the author has problems reading Fraktur (the conference took place at Sennfeld, not Gennfeld: p. 279). Whole sentences reappear verbatim in the text. Elsewhere Elias Schrenk, the well-known nineteenth-century evangelist, is turned into a woman. It is inconceivable that the publisher ever had this study proof-read. The lack of an index of names and subjects makes the book both impenetrable and unusable.