No Sympathy For The Devil

In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. For an earlier

James, an outgoing and confident man, spends his days running a small local bar in northern Canada. His days pass by contently, but uneventfully, watching out for his co-workers and ensuring his bar runs smoothly. Things haven't always been easy for him, though. As quiet as his life has become, it has been at the expense of an all but chequered past; a past of hardship, trouble and crime. James is a survivor, and his struggles have seen him thrive but at a cost, not just in lives. Apart from his colleague, Ben, and the town's local priest, James is all alone - in order to survive, he had to abandon his loved ones long ago. Unfortunately, for James, you can only run away from your past for so long. You can avoid facing it for a time, but you can't hide forever. One day, your past deeds will find a way to catch up to you.

Kent Anderson's stunning debut novel is a modern classic, a harrowing, authentic picture of one American soldier's experience of the Vietnam War--"unlike anything else in war literature" (Los Angeles Review of Books). Hanson joins the Green Berets fresh out of college. Carrying a volume of Yeats's poems in his uniform pocket, he has no idea of what he's about to face in Vietnam--from the enemy, from his fellow soldiers, or within himself. In vivid, nightmarish, and finely etched prose, Kent Anderson takes us through Hanson's two tours of duty and a bitter, ill-fated return to civilian life in-between, capturing the day-to-day process of war like no writer before or since.

In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. The chart-topping, spiritually inflected music created a space in popular culture for talk of Jesus, God, and Christianity, thus lessening for baby boomers and their children the stigma associated with religion while helping to fill churches and create new modes of worship. Stowe shows how evangelicals' increasing acceptance of Christian pop music ultimately has reinforced a variety of conservative cultural, economic, theological, and political messages.

When Detective Catrin Price returns to Cardiff after 12 years of self-imposed exile she is determined to lay to rest the ghosts of her unhappy past. Then her ex-boyfriend Rhys, once a promising young policeman but now a washed-up junkie, is found dead on one of her first nights on patrol. The official verdict is an accidental overdose, but Cat is convinced that there is something more to his death, something that will explain why the man who saved her life was so unwilling to save his own. Rhys had always been haunted by the mysterious disappearance of Owen Face, the troubled lead singer of rock band Seerland, who was last seen at a notorious suicide spot. No body was ever found and when Cat joins forces with one of Rhys' former colleagues, now a wealthy business man obsessed with all things Seerland-related, they begin to wonder whether the rumours that Face is still alive may be true. But when Cat is stalked by a meancing figure with a striking resemblance to a serial rapist Rhys famously put away, she begins to realise her life may also be in danger.

‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive ...”’

Details the 1895 arrest and trial of a medical student for the grisly murder of two young women inside San Francisco's Emmanuel Baptist Church in what the press of the day characterized as a reenactment of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Detached and ironic; a master of the pointed put-down, of the cutting quip; enigmatic, impossible to truly know: this is the calcified public image of Gore Vidal--one the man himself was fond of reinforcing. "I'm exactly as I appear," he once said of himself. "There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water." Michael Mewshaw's Sympathy for the Devil, a memoir of his friendship with the stubbornly iconoclastic public intellectual, is a welcome corrective to this tired received wisdom. A complex, nuanced portrait emerges in these pages--and while "Gore" can indeed be brusque, standoffish, even cruel, Mewshaw also catches him in more vulnerable moments. The Gore Vidal the reader comes to know here is generous and supportive to younger, less successful writers; he is also, especially toward the end of his life, disappointed, even lonely. Sparkling, often hilarious, and filled with spicy anecdotes about expat life in Italy, Sympathy for the Devil is an irresistible inside account of a man who was himself--faults and all--impossible to resist. As enlightening as it is entertaining, it offers a unique look at a figure many only think they know.