Don't Shoot the Gentile

When James Work took a teaching job at the College of Southern Utah in the mid-1960s, he knew little about teaching and even less about the customs of his Mormon neighbors. For starters, he did not know he was a “Gentile,” the Mormon term for anyone not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But just as he learned to be a religious diplomat and a black-market bourbon runner, he also discovered that his master’s degree in literature apparently qualified him to teach journalism,  photography, creative writing, advanced essay and feature article writing, freshman composition, and “vocabulary building.”With deadpan humor, Work pokes fun at his own naïveté in Don’t Shoot the Gentile, a memoir of his rookie years teaching at a small college in a small, mostly Mormon town.