In the House of the Serpent Handler offers an intimate and engrossing look at the latest generation of Pentecostal believers who “take up” venomous snakes as a test of their religious faith. Focusing on several preachers and their families in six Appalachian states, journalist Julia C. Duin explores the impact that such twenty-first-century phenomena as social media and “reality television” have had on rituals long practiced in obscurity.

As Duin reveals, the mortal snakebite suffered by pastor Mack Wolford in 2012 marked the passing of the torch to younger preachers Jamie Coots and Andrew Hamblin, who were featured in the 2013 series Snake Salvation on the National Geographic Channel. Seeing their participation in the show as a way of publicizing their faith and thus winning converts, Coots and Hamblin attempted to reinvent the snake-handling tradition for a modern audience. The use of the internet, particularly Facebook, became another key part of their strategy to spread their particular brand of Christianity. However, Coots’s own death in 2014 was widely reported after the TV series was canceled, while Hamblin, who emerges as the central figure in the book, was arrested and tried after a shooting incident involving his estranged wife. His hopes of becoming a serpent-handling superstar seemingly dashed, Hamblin spent several months in prison, emerging more determined than ever to keep to the faith. By the end of the narrative, he has begun a new church where he can pass on the tradition to yet another generation.

Duin’s thorough, sympathetic reporting and lively style bring the ecstatic church services she witnessed vividly to life, and through interviews and quotations from the principals’ Facebook postings, she has allowed them to express their beliefs and reveal their everyday lives in their own words. She also gives the reader an up-close view of how a reporter pursues a story and the various difficulties encountered along the way. Together these elements frame a striking picture: the young practitioners of a century-old custom—one so often dismissed as bizarre by outsiders—adjusting to the challenges of the new millennium.

Julia C. Duin, the former religion editor for the Washington Times, has published articles in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other national publications. She is the author of five previous books, including, most recently, Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community.

A lifelong city dweller, Verena Andermatt Conley had long harbored romantic ideals about the natural world and dreamed of a wilderness retreat for herself and her husband, Tom. When a sizable tract of land along the Vermillion River on the edge of Minnesota's Boundary Waters - complete with two primitive log cabins - became available, they jumped at the chance to own a piece of paradise.The War against the Beavers is a wry and funny account of two people's ten-year apprenticeship in backwoods living, from their arrival as literal babes in the woods to their education in the ways of nature as they face plagues of insects, fungus, storms, and droughts, and embark on a lengthy campaign to eradicate a colony of beavers that threatens the peace and beauty of their forest refuge. It is only the coming of a mechanized and much more menacing threat - bulldozers and other heavy machinery clear-cutting the woods - that restores perspective to the obsessed cabin dwellers.