The Saint Louis Blues. It's more than just a slogan or a song. It's a statement of fact. St. Louis has a long and proud connection to the world of the blues. Devil at the Confluence is a story of our country's music that has never before been told. Out of ragtime, out of jazz, out of big band music and beyond, American music came into its own at the confluence of the Big Muddy and the Mississippi rivers and out of the talents and experiences of the musicians who lived there. Filled with biographies and original illustrations, Devil at the Confluence chronicles talents as varied as St Louis Bessie, the legendary Peetie Wheatstraw and Henry Townsend to study this regions' contribution to popular American music. Artist Kevin Belford has combined years of scholarly research and discovery with his well-renowned artwork to present a book that will be equally at home as a lovely coffee table book or in a serious music library. Included with the book is a special compact disc of recordings by St Louis legends produced by Bob Koester, a foremost authority in the field and the founder of Delmark Records. Artists surveyed on the cd include such early bluesmasters as Barrelhouse Buck, Speckled Red, Roosevelt Sykes, St Louis Jimmy, Big Joe Williams, Mary Johnson and many more.

Lucifer Rising is a popular history of Satanism: from Old Testament lore to the posturing of the world's most notorious heavy metal rock bands, all is made accessible. Containing many candid interviews with modern-day Satanists and controversial rock stars, this book makes light of popular culture's darkest secret.

The remarkable true story of a turn-of-the-19th century murder and the trial that ensued—a showdown in which iconic political rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr joined forces to make sure justice was served—from bestselling author of the Edgar finalist, Murder of the Century. In the closing days of 1799, the United States was still a young republic. Waging a fierce battle for its uncertain future were two political parties: the well-moneyed Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, and the populist Republicans, led by Aaron Burr. The two finest lawyers in New York, Burr and Hamilton were bitter rivals both in and out of the courtroom, and as the next election approached, their animosity reached a crescendo. But everything changed when a young Quaker woman, Elma Sands, was found dead in Burr's newly constructed Manhattan Well. The horrific crime quickly gripped the nation, and before long accusations settled on one of Elma’s suitors: a handsome young carpenter named Levi Weeks. As the enraged city demanded a noose be draped around his neck, Week's only hope was to hire a legal dream team. And thus it was that New York’s most bitter political rivals and greatest attorneys did the unthinkable—they teamed up. Our nation’s longest running cold case, Duel with the Devil delivers the first substantial break in the case in over 200 years. At once an absorbing legal thriller and an expertly crafted portrait of the United States in the time of the Founding Fathers, Duel with the Devil is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.

Kansas City, 1929: Myrtle and Jack Bennett sit down with another couple for an evening of bridge. As the game intensifies, Myrtle complains that Jack is a “bum bridge player.” For such insubordination, he slaps her hard in front of their stunned guests and announces he is leaving. Moments later, sobbing, with a Colt .32 pistol in hand, Myrtle fires four shots, killing her husband. The Roaring 1920s inspired nationwide fads–flagpole sitting, marathon dancing, swimming-pool endurance floating. But of all the mad games that cheered Americans between the wars, the least likely was contract bridge. As the Barnum of the bridge craze, Ely Culbertson, a tuxedoed boulevardier with a Russian accent, used mystique, brilliance, and a certain madness to transform bridge from a social pastime into a cultural movement that made him rich and famous. In writings, in lectures, and on the radio, he used the Bennett killing to dramatize bridge as the battle of the sexes. Indeed, Myrtle Bennett’s murder trial became a sensation because it brought a beautiful housewife–and hints of her husband’s infidelity–from the bridge table into the national spotlight. James A. Reed, Myrtle’s high-powered lawyer and onetime Democratic presidential candidate, delivered soaring, tear-filled courtroom orations. As Reed waxed on about the sanctity of womanhood, he was secretly conducting an extramarital romance with a feminist trailblazer who lived next door. To the public, bridge symbolized tossing aside the ideals of the Puritans–who referred derisively to playing cards as “the Devil’s tickets”–and embracing the modern age. Ina time when such fearless women as Amelia Earhart, Dorothy Parker, and Marlene Dietrich were exalted for their boldness, Culbertson positioned his game as a challenge to all housebound women. At the bridge table, he insisted, a woman could be her husband’s equal, and more. In the gathering darkness of the Depression, Culbertson leveraged his own ballyhoo and naughty innuendo for all it was worth, maneuvering himself and his brilliant wife, Jo, his favorite bridge partner, into a media spectacle dubbed the Bridge Battle of the Century. Through these larger-than-life characters and the timeless partnership game they played, The Devil’s Tickets captures a uniquely colorful age and a tension in marriage that is eternal.

"Podmore's essays resemble Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau with an extra dose of social, racial and political analysis." —ARIZONA DAILY SUN In the wake of his river–running mother's death, Zak Podmore explores the healing power of wild places through a lens of grief and regeneration. Visceral, first–person narratives include a canoe crossing of the Colorado River delta during a rare release of water, a kayak sprint down a flash–flooding Little Colorado River, and a packraft trip on the Elwha River in Washington through the largest dam removal project in history. Award–winning journalist and film producer ZAK PODMORE covers conservation issues, outdoor sports, and Utah politics. He is a Report for America fellow at the Salt Lake Tribune and editor–at–large for Canoe & Kayak magazine. His work appears in Outside, High Country News, Four Corners Free Press, and the Huffington Post. He lives in Bluff, Utah.

It's 1960 and Sergeant Ben Kella of the Solomon Islands police force is only a few days into a routine patrol of the most beautiful yet dangerous and primitive areas of the South Pacific. Yet, already, he has been cursed by a magic man, stumbled across evidence of a cult uprising and failed to find an American anthropologist who has been scouring the mountainous jungle in search of a priceless erotic icon. To complicate matters further, at a local mission station, Kella discovers the redoubtable Sister Conchita secretly trying to bury a skeleton, before a mysterious gunman tries to kill her. Mission-educated yet an aofia - the traditional peacemaker of the islands - Kella is forced to link up with Sister Conchita, an independent and rebellious young American nun, in order to track down the perpetrators of a series of bizarre murders . . .

A book of the year for Waterstones, the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the FT, and the Irish Independent. The instant #1 New York Times bestseller. From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump — the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history. Based on dozens of interviews conducted over six years, Green spins the master narrative of the 2016 campaign from its origins in the far fringes of right-wing politics and reality television to its culmination inside Trump’s penthouse on election night. The shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trump’s flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party. Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist who’d never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike. Yet Bannon’s hard-edged ethno-nationalism and his elaborate, years-long plot to destroy Hillary Clinton paved the way for Trump’s unlikely victory. Trump became the avatar of a dark but powerful worldview that dominated the airwaves and spoke to voters whom others couldn’t see. Trump’s campaign was the final phase of a populist insurgency that had been building up in America for years, and Bannon, its inscrutable mastermind, believed it was the culmination of a hard-right global uprising that would change the world. Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is unavoidably a study of Bannon. Devil’s Bargain is a tour-de-force telling of the remarkable confluence of circumstances that decided the election, many of them orchestrated by Bannon and his allies, who really did plot a vast, right-wing conspiracy to stop Clinton. To understand Trump's extraordinary rise and Clinton’s fall, you have to weave Trump’s story together with Bannon’s, or else it doesn't make sense.

That St. Louis Thing is an American story of music, race relations and baseball. Here is over 100 years of the city's famed musical development -- blues, jazz and rock -- placed in the context of its civil rights movement and its political and ecomomic power. Here, too, are the city's people brought alive from its foundation to the racial conflicts in Ferguson in 2014. The panorama of the city presents an often overlooked gem, music that goes far beyond famed artists such as Scott Joplin, Miles Davis and Tina Turner. The city is also the scene of a historic civil rights movement that remained important from its early beginnings into the twenty-first century. And here, too, are the sounds of the crack of the bat during a century-long love affair with baseball.

Will all evil finally turn to good, or does some evil remain stubbornly opposed to God and God's goodness? Will even the devil be redeemed? Addressing a theological issue of perennial interest, this comprehensive book (in two volumes) surveys the history of Christian universalism from the second to the twenty-first century and offers an interpretation of how and why universalist belief arose. The author explores what the church has taught about universal salvation and hell and critiques universalism from a biblical, philosophical, and theological standpoint. He shows that the effort to extend grace to everyone undermines the principle of grace for anyone.

Harpers Ferry National Historical Park is most widely known today for the attempted slave revolt led by John Brown in 1859, the nucleus for the interpretation of the current national park. Here, Teresa S. Moyer and Paul A. Shackel tell the behind-the-scenes story of how this event was chosen and preserved for commemoration, providing lessons for federal, state, local, and non-profit organizations who continually struggle over the dilemma about which past to present to the public. Professional and non-professional audiences alike will benefit from their important insights into how federal agencies interpret the past, and in turn shape public memory.