From Publishers Weekly
Jimmy Swaggart could be an easy target. The former crown prince of televangelism, who channeled the Holy Ghost with unprecedented made-for-TV gusto and turned quickly on fellow Assemblies of God pastors embroiled in sex scandals during the mid-1980s, was the butt of many jokes after his own less-than-pure habits came to light in 1988 courtesy of a vengeful former colleague. But Seaman, an editor and native Texan, approaches her subject not with Old Testament invective but with a patience that conveys an intimate understanding of the man's world. While not an apologist for Swaggart, Seaman probes beyond the headlines for the factors that shaped the pastor's psyche and defined his world. The result is an intelligent and smoothly readable personal history that chronicles a fascinating slice of Americana. Swaggart was part of a trinity of first cousinsAalong with country star Mickey Gilley and rock icon Jerry Lee LewisAall natural entertainers in an intermarried clan of dirt-poor laborers and moonshiners in tiny Ferriday, La., during the heart of the Depression. Desperate to establish an identity within a family increasingly dedicated to the growing Pentecostal movement, Swaggart became inextricably wedded to his role as crusader. The final chapters bring the story full circle with a detailed account of Swaggart's 1990s comeback attempts (one capacity 1991 San Diego crusade was followed less than a week later by another well-publicized rendezvous with a prostitute), and the book ends with the indomitable evangelist preaching to a tiny church with a choir of four people. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This well-documented account of the life of evangelist Jimmy Swaggart is based on interviews with key people and a thorough literature search. Beginning with a fascinating look at his family background, the author traces Swaggart's rise from obscurity to fame, his fall (because of sexual misconduct), and his subsequent efforts to make a comeback. Along the way, the reader becomes acquainted with other celebrities of televangelism and catches a fascinating glimpse into behind-the-scenes religious power politics. Seaman neither whitewashes nor vilifies Swaggart, instead examining him and seeking explanation for both his tremendous accomplishments and tragic flaws. Though unauthorized by the Swaggarts, this honest, evenhanded biography strives for objectivity. It is also the only biography of Swaggart currently available. Recommended for public and academic libraries.AC. Robert Nixon, Lafayette, IN Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Economist, April 15, 2000
Stories about preachers usually come in two types: hagiographies and hatchet jobs. Ann Seaman offers a more balanced view...


From Booklist
Jimmy Swaggart's story is inevitably that of rocker Jerry Lee Lewis, too, which helps Seaman's conceit of rock 'n' roll and Pentecostalism as evil twins. At a Swaggart service, "people stood up, clapped to the beat, sang out strongly and . . . there was barely a whisper of difference between it and that devil's music played by Jimmy's cousins Jerry Lee Lewis and . . . Mickey Gilley." Seaman keeps her ear on that whisper in the fullest portrait of Swaggart to date. She also probes Jimmy's wife, Frances, who, rarely giving interviews, remains an enigma, though Seaman asserts that she "never approached the bimbo territory that . . . Tammy Faye Bakker and Jan Crouch staked out." Fellow TV preacher Marvin Gorman pops up as the agent of Swaggart's downfall (see Lundy's Let Us Prey ), and as sources, so do Jerry Lee's sisters Frankie and Linda Gail and cousin, ex-wife Myra Lewis Williams. Perhaps this is everything you ever wanted to know about the biggest televangelist who ever took a fall and his wild and wacky clan. Mike Tribby


Missiology
“Richly textured, honest, tragic, ironic, respectful... intimately links Pentecostalism, and its ‘evil twin,’ rock and roll.”

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This is the first biography of Jimmy Swaggart to date. But it's not just Jimmy's story; it's the tale of the rise of two intimately linked colossi of the American century: Pentecostalism, the fastest growing religious movement in the world, and its "evil twin," Rock and Roll. A major theme of the book is how the religious ecstasy of Pentecostalism - the rousing music, the speaking in tongues, the reception of the Spirit - combined with its severe sexual repression leads to the kind of furtive acting out that brought down not only Jimmy Swaggart but also numerous other evangelists. It's the story, too, of the rapid rise of the Religious Right, with its competing personalities and ideologies. In the end, the author sees Jimmy as a victim - like many others - of a primitive faith colliding with the forces of late twentieth-century fame.

FROM THE CRITICS

Virginia Vitzthum - Salon

There's a particular type of overachieving Southern white boy raised by a mama who's an angel and a daddy who whupped his ass. Spoiled yet cowed, he becomes a man who keeps sneaking behind God's back. When he gets caught, he repents as wetly as he sins, with the cleansing tears of dipped-in-the-water glory hallelujahs. He can't see how alike the passions of Saturday night and Sunday morning are, though -- the firewall between the flesh and the spirit is too imposing.

To live on both sides of that wall without psychic miscegenation, this Southern man puts some spin on his sin to keep from technical fornication. Bill Clinton withheld his seed and denied the temptress her pleasure. Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis addressed their desire for little girls by marrying them. And Jerry Lee's cousin Jimmy Swaggart had a wonderfully theatrical hedge: He paid prostitutes he didn't touch to re-create pornographic tableaux for him -- devilish, motel-room versions of a living cr￯﾿ﾽche.

Jimmy and Jerry Lee, both born in 1935, grew up poor together in Ferriday, La. Swaggart, Anne Rowe Seaman's biography of the evangelist, argues that both boys ended up in the same line of ecstasy production, that the shaking going on in honky-tonks was a lot like the rapture in revival tents. Swaggart, she contends, was undone in part because he could never acknowledge how fully eroticism powered his preaching.

Seaman offers a fascinating history of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. The Catholic Church condemned this inspired babbling as satanic 900 years ago, though many considered it evidence of blessing by the Holy Ghost. Around 1900, two Pentecostal fundamentalists, one white and one black, revived the practice, and it spread quickly around the United States. "The crossing of racial lines," Seaman writes, "was only one of the qualities that marked Pentecostalism as an outlaw movement￯﾿ﾽ Te same crossover, in the same religious milieu, would produce rock and roll." A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop a-lop-bam-boom, amen.

The Swaggart-Lewis-Gilley family (country music star Mickey Gilley is another cousin) belonged to a Pentecostal faction known as the Assemblies of God. The future evangelist's parents, Sun and Minnie Bell Swaggart, initially considered "Holy Rollers" gauche, but in 1943 Minnie Bell and a handful of relatives got the Ghost, and then religion became an inter-family competition. Instead of bragging about whose son got into which university, mamas would recount their boys' gibbering and twitching on the church floor. Eight-year-old Jimmy did his mother proud soon after her conversion: He not only spoke in tongues, he prophesied a flood in Ferriday and the bombs that would drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Swaggart eventually decided speaking in tongues was too weird for a mass audience, and in 1972 he dropped it from his services.)

Seaman examines Swaggart's subsequent rise through the revival circuit to the peak of televangelism -- and his 1988 fall -- through a forgiving lens of psychology. On page 369 she drops the bombshell that Swaggart may have been sexually abused, repeatedly, by a relative when he was "eight or ten." Though she admits that her sources are shaky, she makes a case for incest that includes as evidence the speaking in tongues, the childhood prophesies and the lifelong "addiction" to pornography and prostitutes. She's less convincing when she diagnoses what Swaggart calls the "demon oppression" of his lust as clinical depression -- an ailment known for dulling sex drive.

Along with overreaching from her armchair, Seaman foreshadows too portentously too often, and the book is a third longer than it needs to be. Her prose tends to thud when she writes about the music in this gifted family. She's unearthed wonderful stories about Jerry Lee and Jimmy learning the "walking left hand" of the "Holy Ghost boogie" by sneaking into all-black dance halls, but she never makes the reader hear glossolalia or Jimmy's piano playing on his gospel records or the difference between a stoned, alf-assed Jerry Lee Lewis concert and a great one.

She has done seven years of reporting, however, and her story is consistently fascinating, with its dead young brothers and sons, child brides, fleets of Cadillacs, media-empire building, rise of the Christian right and the vicious smear campaign that Swaggart and Jim Bakker, the little Caligula of the televangelists, carried out. (Fun fact: In 1983 the unbeautiful Bakkers spent $22,000 on mirrors.) The "Partial Lewis/Swaggart/Gilley Genealogy" chart is astounding, with its "cousin," "nephew" and "sister" arrows crisscrossing the usual lines of marriage and descent.

Most important, Seaman's evenhandedness (I can't tell if she's a Christian herself) invites you to have some sympathy for the hypocritical, megalomaniacal Swaggart. You wish he and his brethren could find a god who wouldn't demand the compartmentalizing that tears them apart. Though a mixed-race-looking womanish man is probably the last prophet these Southern boys would heed, they could all take a page from him whose name was Prince when he sang: "I know from righteous/I know from sin/I got two sides/And they both friends."

Publishers Weekly

Jimmy Swaggart could be an easy target. The former crown prince of televangelism, who channeled the Holy Ghost with unprecedented made-for-TV gusto and turned quickly on fellow Assemblies of God pastors embroiled in sex scandals during the mid-1980s, was the butt of many jokes after his own less-than-pure habits came to light in 1988 courtesy of a vengeful former colleague. But Seaman, an editor and native Texan, approaches her subject not with Old Testament invective but with a patience that conveys an intimate understanding of the man's world. While not an apologist for Swaggart, Seaman probes beyond the headlines for the factors that shaped the pastor's psyche and defined his world. The result is an intelligent and smoothly readable personal history that chronicles a fascinating slice of Americana. Swaggart was part of a trinity of first cousins--along with country star Mickey Gilley and rock icon Jerry Lee Lewis--all natural entertainers in an intermarried clan of dirt-poor laborers and moonshiners in tiny Ferriday, La., during the heart of the Depression. Desperate to establish an identity within a family increasingly dedicated to the growing Pentecostal movement, Swaggart became inextricably wedded to his role as crusader. The final chapters bring the story full circle with a detailed account of Swaggart's 1990s comeback attempts (one capacity 1991 San Diego crusade was followed less than a week later by another well-publicized rendezvous with a prostitute), and the book ends with the indomitable evangelist preaching to a tiny church with a choir of four people. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This well-documented account of the life of evangelist Jimmy Swaggart is based on interviews with key people and a thorough literature search. Beginning with a fascinating look at his family background, the author traces Swaggart's rise from obscurity to fame, his fall (because of sexual misconduct), and his subsequent efforts to make a comeback. Along the way, the reader becomes acquainted with other celebrities of televangelism and catches a fascinating glimpse into behind-the-scenes religious power politics. Seaman neither whitewashes nor vilifies Swaggart, instead examining him and seeking explanation for both his tremendous accomplishments and tragic flaws. Though unauthorized by the Swaggarts, this honest, evenhanded biography strives for objectivity. It is also the only biography of Swaggart currently available. Recommended for public and academic libraries.--C. Robert Nixon, Lafayette, IN Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews