Books: Amen, Sinner

GOD IN THE STRAW PEN—John Fort—Dodd, Mead ($2).

Itinerant Methodist Preacher Isham Lowe sat his horse through the mountains of Tennessee, setting his course for the Georgia uplands. At his heels brooded Assistant John Semple. The time was 1830, the climate good for camp meetings. Preacher Lowe had been doing it for years; he had grown grey, unctuous, successfully stout in revivalism. Preacher Semple was young, thin, a little peaked; a poor mixer and not yet really saved; he sometimes found it hard to face crowds, hard to bear Preacher Lowe's booming...