Ronald B. Scott

The Mending (2019)
Print by Austin Macauley Publishers (Adult) Author In R.B. Scott’s newest novel, The Mending, the past collides with the present as the deeply spiritual, yet iconoclastic Benjamin Adams Pratt prepares to return to Salt Lake City, where he was born and raised, for a milestone high school reunion. What unfolds over the next hundred thousand words or so is a poignant and rollicking homecoming of a prodigal—in this case, the boy who forsook the Mormon Zion for the glamor and pace of Manhattan. Along the way, refreshingly nuanced and complex perspectives on faith, love, and personal acceptance emerge almost inadvertently. A confessed narcissist and recusant Mormon, Ben’s chronic personal guilt for his spiritual and emotional inadequacies override his thoughts as we invade his mind on the homeward-bound flight to the city of his birth. He is certain that he has fallen short of expectations; his own and his parents, particularly his father’s. As snapshots from his past emerge, memories and issues he’d assumed were buried and forgotten, a comprehensive portrait emerges of an achingly self-conscious man of remarkable devotion and awkward loyalty. It matters not that he deliberately distanced himself from family and friends decades earlier and is intellectually dismissive of the restrictive religion and culture he inherited.

Closing Circles (2003 - 2012)
by Gray Dog Press Author Jed Russell awoke one morning to find that he had been transformed into an ex-husband. In early 1980's Westport, Connecticut, Jed Russell, a successful journalist and writer-for-hire, suddenly found himself joining the growing ranks of divorced men in their mid-thirties. But, Jed Russell was perplexed and unprepared. Hadn't he been a committed husband and partner? Hadn't he participated fully in caring for his children? Hadn't he encouraged Sarah, his newly-become ex-wife, to finish her studies and have a career? Hadn't sex with Sarah been fantastic right up through the night before she served him divorce papers? What went wrong with his marriage and what did he have to do to save it? Sarah had been encouraging Jed to seek psychiatric counseling for years, so despite his aversion for "mind-changers--psychologists and therapists and preachers and other posers who claim they can facilitate personal reconciliations with what God deemed irreconcilable in this life," he grudgingly begins therapy with Dr. "Quack-Quack" Rosenbaum, a compulsive, loopy psychiatrist who launches Jed on a long journey where the search for self-awareness quickly becomes an awareness of self-ignorance and denial. The physical distance between New York City where Jed works and Salt Lake City where he grew up at first seemed large enough to isolate him from the conflicting, convoluted influences of his traditional Mormon upbringing, but therapy and introspection were making it clear that things were not quite that simple. From his Hebrew and Yiddish speaking Mormon grandmother’s warning "Chozzer dreck macht goyisher kopf (Pig shit makes gentile brains)" to his dashed youthful anti-racist idealism, to his guilt for his ''natural man" sexual desires, Jed, like Alexander Portnoy (Portnoy’s Complaint), was carrying around more than his share of tsooris and schpilkes. "The big difference between Judah and Joseph is humor. Jews poke fun at themselves and their culture. Mormons don't have six millenia on their side. So, for now, we are a hypersensitive and decidedly humorless lot indeed..." At the same time, Jed continues working on the book he had begun that may have been the real cause of his divorce. A mix of autobiography and investigation that leads to obscure, but transforming events of life as well as those in the complex family history of his in-laws, the early drafts of book annoyed Sarah who deridingly entitled it "Mormon Masturbation Myths,” and every attempt to have excerpts read by family members ends up with comments such as "It pains me deeply to read your filth. I hope your children will forgive you because I won't..." Pressing on with his life and with his book, Jed tumbles into a new relationship with a caring woman (although she is the assistant to his psychiatrist and "way, way too young") and starts sorting out the fascinatingly twisted life of his late father-in-law, Ralph Orson Thompson ("Old ROT"), the wayward but loyal son of a prominent Mormon leader, a former OSS spy who contracted a mysterious disease during WWII. Three times divorced, ROT’s last wife Mary Martha (Sarah’s mother) is the same age as his daughter Mary Martha, and both are half-sisters of his namesake only son, and, of course, Sarah and her two sisters. Jed's book is taking him somewhere he never expected—deep into his own past and the polygamous roots and thorny realities of his own family, on all sides. It puts him face to face with modern-day traditional and "serial" polygamists and illuminates the banality of multiple partners and divorce in today's society that reaches far beyond the confines of Utah and Mormonism. What he finds will force him to re-consider everything he had ever believed about marriage, divorce, and fatherhood, and especially, what he believed about himself.

Mitt Romney: An Inside Look At The Man And His Politics (2011)
by Lyons Press/Globe Pequot Press (Documentary) Author Independent biographical profile of 2012 U.S. presidential candidate W. Mitt Romney,, now a U.S. Senator representing the State of Utah