Once again ensconced in his quaintly appointed Lower Manhattan loft, Kinky Friedman - Ace Private Eye - takes on the deceptively tame assignment of helping his pal Ratso find his true birth mother. But a job that begins with some ungenteel poking around in a dusty New York warehouse quickly leads to even untidier mayhem involving a couple of stiffs and an apparent plot to kill Ratso before he can uncover his ancestry (and possible inheritance). The trail shifts to Miami Beach, then back to Manhattan, and finally ends in the posh New York suburb of Chappaqua, where wrongs get righted, rights get read and readers get the full benefit of Kinky's irreverent wit and hilarious wisdom. It is the Kinkster at his considerable best.

Almost two decades after his death, John Wayne is still America’s favorite movie star. More than an actor, Wayne is a cultural icon whose stature seems to grow with the passage of time. In this illuminating biography, Ronald L. Davis focuses on Wayne’s human side, portraying a complex personality defined by frailty and insecurity as well as by courage and strength. Davis traces Wayne’s story from its beginnings in Winterset, Iowa, to his death in 1979. This is not a story of instant fame: only after a decade in budget westerns did Wayne receive serious consideration, for his performance in John Ford’s 1939 film Stagecoach. From that point on, his skills and popularity grew as he appeared in such classics as Fort Apache, Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searches, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, and True Grit. A man’s ideal more than a woman’s, Wayne earned his popularity without becoming either a great actor or a sex symbol. In all his films, whatever the character, John Wayne portrayed John Wayne, a persona he created for himself: the tough, gritty loner whose mission was to uphold the frontier’s--and the nation’s--traditional values. To depict the different facets of Wayne’s life and career, Davis draws on a range of primary and secondary sources, most notably exclusive interviews with the people who knew Wayne well, including the actor’s costar Maureen O’Hara and his widow, Pilar Wayne. The result is a well-balanced, highly engaging portrait of a man whose private identity was eventually overshadowed by his screen persona--until he came to represent America itself.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.

References to western movies scattered over some 250 works by more than 130 authors constitute the subject matter of this book, arranged in an encyclopedic format. The entries are distributed among western movies, television series, big screen and television actors, western writers, directors and miscellaneous topics related to the genre. The data cover films from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to No Country for Old Men (2007) and the entries include many western film milestones (from The Aryan through Shane to Unforgiven), television classics (Gunsmoke, Bonanza) and great screen cowboys of both "A" and "B" productions.

A ripsnorting Western, as brashly entertaining as they come. Slambang! --The New York Times on John Ford's The Searchers John Ford's The Searchers defined the spirit of America, influenced a generation of film makers, and was named the Greatest Western Movie of All Time by the American Film Institute in 2008. Now, the novel that gave birth to the film returns to print--a timeless work of vivid, raw western fiction and a no-holds-barred portrait of the real American frontier. From the moment they left their homestead unguarded on that scorching Texas day, Martin Pauley and Amos Edwards became searchers. First they had to return to the decimated ranch, bury the bodies of their family, and confront the evil cunning of the Comanche who had slaughtered them. Then they set out in pursuit of missing Debbie Edwards. In the years that follow, Amos and Martin survive storms of nature and of men, seeking more than a missing girl, and more than revenge. Both are driven by secrets, guilt, love, and rage. Defying the dangers all around them, two men become a frontier legend, searching for the one moment, and the one last battle, that will finally set them free. . . "As brashly entertaining as they come." --New York Times "Epic. . .a drama of stubborn courage to which the prose lends a matching stature." --Kirkus Reviews Alan Le May was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and attended Stetson University in DeLand, Florida in 1916. In 1918 he registered for the World War I draft in Aurora, and then enlisted and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. While attending the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1922 with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree, he joined the Illinois National Guard. He was promoted to First Lieutenant Field Artillery for the Illinois National Guard in 1923. He published his first novel, Painted Ponies,/I>, in 1927 (about the Cheyenne and the U. S. Cavalry horse soldiers).

At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called "southern." Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since "the Troubles" of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.

How many lesbians can dance on the head of a pin? Kinky Friedman sure as hell doesn't know, but he's learning exactly how many it takes to send the geriatric plaster tumbling from the ceiling of his downtown New York loft. The culprit is one Winnie Katz, man-hating proprietress of a lesbian dance troupe that thunders daily through his waking dreams. And when Winnie won't even give it enough of a rest to let Kinky patch the hole, our hero, lost in a blue-gray haze of Irish whiskey and cigar smoke, takes drastic action. He pens an anonymous, threatening note, hoping -- as only one lost in an alcohol-soaked fantasy can hope -- to then step in as "Ace Private Big Dick" Friedman, and save the day, thus earning the undying gratitude of Ms. Winnie. Besides, just as Sherlock Holmes had his Watson, the Kinkster needs a suitable sidekick, and what better test? He calls on each of his Village Irregulars to solve the case: reporter Mike McGovern; Dylan look-alike Ratso Sloman; investigator Steve Rambam; and his own lady love, the delicious Stephanie Dupont. But things get dicey when the bogus death threat turns all too real, and suddenly Kinky and his Keystone crime fighters find themselves dancing -- none too daintily -- for their lives.

In the middle of the conservative 1950s, rock and roll hit popular culture like an explosion a Big Bang, Baby! And the fallout from that explosion is still electrifying music fans today. Popular music expert Richard Crouse has ventured deep into the far reaches of rock history to bring together this dynamic collection of facts and oddities. Big Bang, Baby will entertain and enlighten music fans of all eras and will challenge even experienced rock trivia junkies.

“This first novel by a disabled Vietnam veteran compassionately examines a year in the life of a combat infantryman during that conflict” (Publishers Weekly). Alone in the Valley tells the story of nineteen-year-old Daniel Perdue and his year as a grunt, pursuing an elusive enemy through the steamy jungles of the Central Vietnamese Highlands. From the moment the boy solider touches down until he is airborne on his way home again, author Kenneth Waymon Baker makes sure the reader hears every sound, sees every sight, feels every emotion as his young hero faces the rigors of war. Daniel is changed forever, a man who will return with the instincts of a warrior. If you only read one book about Vietnam, make it Alone in the Valley. It will leave you touched and changed. “A well-written and unassuming debut novel whose very artlessness is its principle virtue. Though his voice is unique, Baker tells it exactly as it was.” —Kirkus Reviews

In her witty, southern-fried suspense novels, Sarah Shankman delivers nonstop action with a hilarious bite. Now she sends her acclaimed, irreverent heroine -- New Orleans writer Samantha Adams -- to a southwestern New Age hot spot, to unearth a secret past that was supposed to be six feet under. My dearest Sugar. I must see you. It's urgent. I need your help. The letter that arrived from Sam's mother was postmarked Santa Fe, penned in her mother's handwriting, and disclosed details only Johanna Adams could know. There was just one catch: Johanna Adams had been dead for thirty-four years. The mind-blowing missive could have been an entry from Sam's latest book of bizarre anecdotes, American Weird -- or an elaborate hoax. Either way, it instantly rekindled Sam's impossible wish that her mother hadn't really died in a plane crash when Sam was a child. Fueled by her journalistic instincts -- and a daughter's need for closure -- Sam touches down among Santa Fe's tourists and crystal gazers, jewelry shops and fast-food stands. But only when she summons the courage to knock on the door of Room 409 at the La Fonda Hotel does her surreal, mother-seeking adventure take off with no turning back.