Jim Elliot was twenty-eight when he and four companions were killed by the Waorani in Ecuador in 1956, and the account of it in Through Gates of Splendor made him one of the best-known missionaries of the century. These are the journals he kept before any of that happened.

Edited by his widow Elisabeth Elliot, they record his reading, his prayers, his self-examination and his wrestling over the call to go, in entries written for nobody but himself. He is best remembered for a line out of these pages: he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep for what he cannot lose.