Making it in Hell, says Bruce Jackson, is the spirit behind the sixty-five work songs gathered in this eloquent dispatch from a brutal era of prison life in the Deep South. Through engagingly documented song arrangements and profiles of their singers, Jackson shows how such pieces as "Hammer Ring," "Ration Blues," "Yellow Gal," and "Jody's Got My Wife and Gone" are like no other folk music forms: they are distinctly African in heritage, diminished in power and meaning outside their prison context, and used exclusively by black convicts. The songs helped workers through the rigors of cane cutting, logging, and cotton picking. Perhaps most important, they helped resolve the men's hopes and longings and allowed them a subtle outlet for grievances they could never voice when face-to-face with their jailers.

A Dan Shaw Thriller Dan Shaw, night school law student, ex-Army cop, and part-time investigator for hotshot attorney Thomas Petrie, has 57 hours to find a man who may already be dead. Peter Falconer is one of the golden boys of Bell Harbor, Florida—or he soon will be after inheriting the family fortune. But what seems to be yet another typical case of murder for profit and passion is about to take a sudden U-turn. For Shaw is about to uncover a brand of thrill killing whose sheer evil he can’t begin to fathom. And Shaw had better get to the bottom—and fast—or the hunt taking him from the Keys to the Caribbean and into the eye of a tropical storm will cost him his life.

Accompany CD has excerpts from a speech given by Alan Lomax on March 7, 1989, at the New York Public Library plus seven tracks of folk songs recorded by Alan Lomax.

On a blowtorch-hot night in Cape Town, ex-model Roxy Palmer and her gunrunner husband, Joe, are carjacked, leaving Joe lying in a pool of blood. As the carjackers make their getaway, Roxy makes a choice that changes her life forever. Disco and Godwynn, the ghetto gangbangers who sped away in Joe's convertible, will stop at nothing to track her down. Billy Afrika, a mixed-race ex-cop turned mercenary, won't let her out of his sight because Joe owed him a chunk of money. And hunting them all is Piper, a love-crazed psychopath determined to renew his vows with his jailhouse "wife," Disco. As these desperate lives collide and old debts are settled in blood, Roxy is caught in a wave of escalating violence in the beautiful and brutal African seaport.

Get Up Off Your Knees is a thoughtful and provocative collection of sermons by a group of preachers from across the international church spectrum who have been moved to theological reflection on the art and work of U2. This book will appeal to fans of U2, students of homiletics, and everyone interested in the intersection of art, popular culture, and religion.