BILLY GRAHAM: A PARABLE OF AMERICAN RIGHTEOUSNESS
by Marshall Frady; Little, Brown; 546 pages; $12.95
His predecessors belonged to a fiercer school of Gospel-booming sockdolagy: back-country camp-meeting divines, like Charles Finney, exhaling vivid damnations and, later, out of the '20s, Billy Sunday, in white spats and straw skimmer, ranting indictments of "hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, sponge-columned, mush-fisted, jelly-spined, four-flushing Christians."
In postwar America, Billy Graham delivered a somewhat mellower, suburban version of revivalist hellfire. "In the end," writes Biographer Marshall Frady, "it was somehow an oddly denatured variety of the harsh vinegars of frontier...
