Böcker av Josh Howard

Hell's Not Far Off is a grounded, politically engaged study of the Appalachian journalist and political critic Bruce Crawford, a scourge of coal and railway interests. Crawford fought injustices wherever he saw them at major risk to his own life and became an early interpreter of Appalachian labor history. His writings and actions from the 1920s to the 1960s helped shape southwest Virginia and West Virginia. Through Crawford's Weekly, a newspaper active from 1920 to 1935, Crawford challenged the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs, and the private police forces of coal barons. The wounds received for these efforts were the closing of his paper and a bullet to his leg during a Harlan County strike in the 1930s. In his work after journalism, he led the West Virginia branch of the Federal Writers' Project during the political standoff over the contents of the state's official guidebook. In Hell's Not Far Off, Josh Howard resurrects strands of a radical tradition centered especially on matters of labor, environment, and race, drawing attention to that tradition's ongoing salience: "Present-day Appalachia's fights were [Crawford's], and his fights are still ours."

What are you desperate for? Everybody has something. It could be family, popularity, a job promotion, a killer beach body, or any other thing that we strive for on a daily basis. But the fact is you're desperate for something, because you were made that way. You were created to be desperate for your creator. There is a God sized hole in your heart and it needs to be filled and too often we try to fill that hole with things that we find in this world. But you know this world will never fill it. That hole that you feel can only be filled by Jesus Christ. You can only remain full if you live your life in desperation for the one who died to set you free. The book you hold in your hand isn't a magic formula. It won't fix the holes in your life. But it does point to the One who can, Jesus. It is my hope that, as you read this book, you will be challenged to begin to live your life in desperation for Jesus Christ, and if you do, I promise it will set you free. Are you determined to be desperate?

For the last 10 years, Nara Kilday has gone up against the worst Hell has to offer, losing many friends and allies along the way. Now she faces her greatest threat: an unholy pact between her oldest nemesis and the Great Beast.