Mad to be Saved


Book Description

Film critic David Sterritt presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the Beat Generation, its intersections with main-stream and experimental film, and the interactions of all of these with American society and the culture of the 1950s. Sterritt balances the Beat countercultural goal of rebellion through both artistic creation and everyday behavior against the mainstream values of conformity and conservatism, growing worry over cold-war hostilities, and the "rat race" toward material success. After an introductory overview of the Beat Generation, its history, its antecedents, and its influences, Sterritt shows the importance of "visual thinking" in the lives and works of major Beat authors, most notably Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. He turns to Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theory to portray the Beat writers-who were inspired by jazz and other liberating influences-as carnivalesque rebels against what they perceived as a rigid and stifling social order. Showing the Beats as social critics, Sterritt looks at the work of 1950s photographers Robert Frank and William Klein; the attack against Beat culture in the pictures and prose of Life magazine; and the counterattack in Frank's film Pull My Daisy, featuring key Beat personalities. He further explores expressions of rebelliousness in film noir, the melodramas of director Douglas Sirk, and other Hollywood films. Finally, Sterritt shows the changing attitudes toward the Beat sensibility in Beat-related Hollywood movies like A Bucket of Blood and The Beat Generation; television programs like Route 66 and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; nonstudio films like John Cassavetes's improvisational Shadows and Shirley Clarke's experimental The Connection; and radically avant-garde works by such doggedly independent screen artists as Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, Bruce Connor, and Ken Jacobs, drawing connections between their achievements and the most subversive products of their Beat contemporaries.







The Congregationalist


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Mad for God


Book Description

Convinced he was the Elijah Messiah, the Spanish peasant Bartolomé Sánchez believed that God had sent him in divine retribution for the crimes committed by the Inquisition and the Church. Sánchez's vocal and intolerable religious deviance quickly landed him in the very court he believed he was sent to destroy. Fortunately for him, the first inquisitor assigned to his case came to believe that Sánchez was not guilty by virtue of insanity, and tried to collect the proof that would save his life. For seven years, Sánchez shuttled between jails, hospitals, and his home village while his fate hung in the balance. Nalle convincingly evokes the compassion of Sánchez's first inquisitor, Pedro Cortes, as he struggled to save his prisoner's life, and argues that the Spanish, compared to other Europeans of the day, were remarkably rational and humane when dealing with the mentally ill. A gripping tale of madness and religious conviction, Mad for God offers new historical insight into the ongoing debate over the nature of religious inspiration, insanity, and criminal responsibility.




The Mad Ones


Book Description

Mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved... 18-year-old Samantha Brown sits in a hand-me-down car with the keys clutched in her hand. Caught between a yearning for the unknown and feeling bound by expectation, she telescopes back to a time before her world had fallen apart. As she relives her senior year, we meet Sam’s well-intentioned helicopter mother Bev and her high school sweetheart of a boyfriend Adam, but it’s her painfully alive best friend Kelly that haunts her. Kelly was everything Sam is not – impetuous and daring. She pushed Sam to break rules and do the unexpected. When Kelly’s killed in a car wreck, Sam loses not only her best friend but also the part of herself that was learning to be brave. Now, Sam has to make a decision. Will she follow her mother’s dreams for her, or will she summon the courage to drive away from her friends and family into a future she can’t imagine?







Outing


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Gay Girl, Good God


Book Description

“I used to be a lesbian.” In Gay Girl, Good God, author Jackie Hill Perry shares her own story, offering practical tools that helped her in the process of finding wholeness. Jackie grew up fatherless and experienced gender confusion. She embraced masculinity and homosexuality with every fiber of her being. She knew that Christians had a lot to say about all of the above. But was she supposed to change herself? How was she supposed to stop loving women, when homosexuality felt more natural to her than heterosexuality ever could? At age nineteen, Jackie came face-to-face with what it meant to be made new. And not in a church, or through contact with Christians. God broke in and turned her heart toward Him right in her own bedroom in light of His gospel. Read in order to understand. Read in order to hope. Or read in order, like Jackie, to be made new.