English-born Francis Asbury was one of the most important religious leaders in American history. Asbury single-handedly guided the creation of the American Methodist church, which became the largest Protestant denomination in nineteenth-century America, and laid the foundation of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements that flourish today. John Wigger has written the definitive biography of Asbury and, by extension, a revealing interpretation of the early years of the Methodist movement in America. Asbury emerges here as not merely an influential religious leader, but a fascinating character, who lived an extraordinary life. His cultural sensitivity was matched only by his ability to organize. His life of prayer and voluntary poverty were legendary, as was his generosity to the poor. He had a remarkable ability to connect with ordinary people, and he met with thousands of them as he crisscrossed the nation, riding more than one hundred and thirty thousand miles between his arrival in America in 1771 and his death in 1816. Indeed Wigger notes that Asbury was more recognized face-to-face than any other American of his day, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

In 1974 Jim and Tammy Bakker launched their television show, the PTL Club, from a former furniture store in Charlotte, N.C. with half a dozen friends. By 1987 they stood at the center of a ministry empire that included their own satellite network, a 2300-acre theme park visited by six million people a year, and millions of adoring fans. The Bakkers led a life of conspicuous consumption perfectly aligned with the prosperity gospel they preached. They bought vacation homes, traveled first-class with an entourage and proclaimed that God wanted everyone to be healthy and wealthy. When it all fell apart, after revelations of a sex scandal and massive financial mismanagement, all of America watched more than two years of federal investigation and trial as Jim was eventually convicted on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. He would go on to serve five years in federal prison. PTL is more than just the spectacular story of the rise and fall of the Bakkers, John Wigger traces their lives from humble beginnings to wealth, fame, and eventual disgrace. At its core, PTL is the story of a group of people committed to religious innovation, who pushed the boundaries of evangelical religion's engagement with American culture. Drawing on trial transcripts, videotapes, newspaper articles, and interviews with key insiders, dissidents, and lawyers, Wigger reveals the power of religion to redirect American culture. This is the story of a grand vision gone wrong, of the power of big religion in American life and its limits.

In 1971, "D. B. Cooper" pulled off what some call the crime of the century, skyjacking a Boeing 727 and parachuting into history and legend. Here's a book that offers a gripping account of that still-unsolved case, based on never-before-published interviews, showing how it launched one of the most extraordinary eras in American aviation history. In November 1971, an unidentified man later anointed by the media as "D.B. Cooper" pulled off one of the most audacious crimes in aviation history, hijacking a Northwest Airlines flight over the Pacific Northwest and parachuting from the Boeing 727 with $200,000 in ransom. "D. B. Cooper" was never to be seen again and the FBI, which kept his case open for forty years, finally determined it would never be solved. Unsolved, perhaps, but much admired. Over the next seven months, a number of air pirates imitated Cooper's crime. None were more daring than the hijacker of American Airlines Flight 119. After commandeering the flight from St. Louis with a machine gun and collecting $502,500 in ransom, the Flight 119 hijacker parachuted into the night over Indiana. Unlike Cooper, he was found. These two crimes were part of a wave of hijackings that occurred between 1961 and 1972, "D. B. Cooper" may have been the most famous, but he was far from alone. One hijacker ran across the tarmac in Reno, Nevada with a pillowcase over his head, gun in hand, to seize a United Airlines flight. Another collected a large ransom in Washington, D.C. before jumping over Honduras. Motivations in many cases remain murky, an admixture of politics, greed, derring-do, and boredom. What they had in common was how they transfixed the nation's attention, bringing about a transformation in the ways that commercial airlines were run and how the laws of the skies were enforced. With its focus on the parachute hijackers, beginning with "D. B. Cooper," John Wigger's book gathers together the stories of this period of daring criminality and recounts them in gripping fashion, showing their effect on the public, the media, and law enforcement. Using never-before published interviews and first-hand accounts, he brings one of the most chaotic periods in U.S. commercial aviation to life.

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In the early months of 1987 Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had it all-a popular Christian talk show, produced on their own PTL satellite television network, a 2300-acre theme park visited by six million people, 2700 employees, and millions of adoring fans. By the end of that year the Bakkers would lose everything. Jim became embroiled in a sexual assault lawsuit, which resulted in his forced resignation as president of PTL. Two years later he was accused and eventually convicted of fraud, landing him in jail for nearly five years. The Bakker empire had fallen, and to many its collapse was symbolic of the changes occurring in the wider culture, both evangelical and secular. Many who watched the trial of Jim Bakker viewed its circus-like atmosphere as the very essence of the 1980s culture of excess, and particularly the greed and hypocrisy of prominent televangelists. Others-those who were employed by the PTL, or whose lives were touched by the Bakker's-saw the organization as an inspiring, innovative, and sincere attempt to spread the word of God, and were not entirely disillusioned by its disbandment. This juxtaposition is illustrated in the very name of the organization: to believers the acronym stood for Praise the Lord or People that Love, while critics said it stood for Pass the Loot or Pay the Lady (a reference Tammy Faye's outrageous makeup). Thus, in three letters, one finds the tensions that defined the time-the boundless optimism of evangelicals paired with the equal and opposite skepticism of non-believers; America's newfound fanaticism for televised entertainment and the disdain for the lurid excesses of the rich and famous. On its surface, PTL is the spectacular story of the rise and fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker from humble beginnings to wealth, fame, and eventual disgrace. John Wigger makes the case that this is also the story of a group of people who stood at the center of several major trends in American religion and culture during the 1970s and 1980s: the expansion of religion into television and entertainment, the extension of a faith mission model of the church, the rise and collapse of the prosperity gospel, the increasing power of religious celebrities, the mobilization of the laity, and the resurgence of evangelicalism in American life.