The Journals of Jim Elliot

The section headings carry the whole shape: junior year at Wheaton, 1948; summer, 1948; senior year, 1948–1949; summer and fall, 1949; "Waiting on God, 1950"; "Homework, 1951"; then "Ecuador, 1952–1955." Elliot was twenty when the notebooks start; the entries stop in the last year of his life. He was killed in January 1956. Elisabeth Elliot, his widow, assembled and edited them and published them in 1978.

It is a journal rather than a memoir, and it reads like one. Long stretches are Scripture — a text copied out, what he takes it to mean, what he intends to do about it — set among lists, prayers, plans and a great deal of self-accusation. The headings between college and the mission field cover 1949, 1950 and 1951, and hold the most ordinary pages in the book: a young man with a settled conviction and nowhere yet to take it, writing down how the time is going. The words throughout are his.

It suits a reader who already knows the outline of Elliot's life and wants the source instead of the portrait. The reservation is real. This is a primary document: repetitive, private, and often opaque, referring to people and books it never explains, and the self-examination runs relentless enough at times to read as scrupulosity. Nothing is shaped for an audience, because none was expected. The life told as a story is a different book.