The gentle sheep who worship the GAs will tell themselves that the GAs must give the proceeds to widows, orphans and/or to replace lampshades in the Celestial Room of a temple near you.
The GAs won't say anything about it because they know the sheep will fill in the blanks with faith-promoting nonsense supported by nothing but wishful thinking. As the GAs fly around on Huntsman's private jet, I'm sure that they will, privately, come up with many good ideas concerning where to best use that extra income. ;o)
It was mentioned here, and it got bad reviews on the Deseret Books website (if I recall correctly) because it was almost exactly like the talk he gave in Conference. One of the mormons reviewers said that if he had known what the book would contain he woulda just used his Ensign.
Maybe someone can refresh my memory? It did seem like a conference talk would make a pretty slim hardcover...
I received it as a gift from a TBM family member. If it wasn't ghost written, it probably should have been. Seemed like a cut-and-paste job of mostly forgettable anecdotes and faith-promoting drivel--probably gleaned from old clippings and notes in some files and polished up by staffers.
Hinckley prided himself on being a PR man and, given the prevailing practices in the PR field, it wouldn't be surprising if somebody else (or a team of somebody elses) did 95% of the work on the book and Hinckley just reviewed the process 2 or 3 times and made a few suggestions on what he wanted to see in the final product.
I remember Neil A. Maxwell's famous book "Things as They Really Are." Initially, I liked it because I was still trying hard to be a true believer. His principal point was that the things taught by the Church constitute reality (or "things as they really are"), so if Church teachings bother you, the only reasonable thing is to correct yourself and put yourself in harmony with "things as they really are." Fighting or arguing or doubting Church teachings would just put you at odds with "things as they really are." In other words, resistance is futile.
Later, after I realized that the incoherent mish-mash of nonsense contained in Mormon scriptures and the absurd hodge-podge of platitudes that have been preached over Mormon pulpits for generations actually are not and never have been the sum total of "things as they really are." Or, put another way, the fact that 95.63% of Mormonism is bullsh*t, is one aspect of "things as they really are."
Maxwell's whole thesis was really a massive monument to circular reasoning. I'm surprised I didn't recognize it for what it really was right at the beginning. (And he was supposedly one of the "intellectual" General Authorities.)
I would rather read the BoM than any of them and that is saying a lot.
When I was a teenager my mom's husband (my dad) left her for another woman. To console her, her ex-mother-in-law sent her a copy of Sheri Dew's "If Life Were Easy, It Wouldn't Be Hard."
Nothing brings a freshly-single-parent family together like a good old-fashioned book burning.
What the GAs have is access to Church History people. The GA writing a book picks up his phone, calls the Church History person and says "I need a quote and a story illustrating thus-and-so" and the Church history people get right on it and supply the GA with the story, the quote and the footnote. All the GA has to do is set it up. Same with conference talks.