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From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain comes a stirring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry.

At the age of thirty-three, Erik Reece's father, a Baptist minister, took his own life, leaving Erik in the care of his grandmother and his grandfather-also a fundamentalist Baptist preacher and a pillar of his rural Virginia community. While Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he unexpectedly found comfort in the Jefferson Bible. Inspired by the text, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest to identify an American gospel coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to William James to Lynn Margulis. The result of Reece's journey is a deeply intimate, stirring book about personal, political, and historical demons-and the geniuses we must call upon to combat them.

Erik Reece is the author of Lost Mountain, for which he won the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's John B. Oakes Award and the Sierra Club's David R. Brower Award for environmental writing. His work appears regularly in Harper's, Orion, The Nation, and Oxford American. He lives in Kentucky, where he is a writer in residence at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.