Books by Kevin Adams

The Extravagant Fool is an underdog narrative. Readers will have a front row seat to Kevin Adams's breathtaking story-one that builds chronologically through a very difficult four-year period. At the height of financial success, Kevin Adams had it all. A thriving business with more work than he could get to, investments spread out between luxury homes, commercial real estate, and new business ventures. However, by January 2009, over the course of the last 100 days of 2008, Kevin watched in silent amazement as he lost it all. His house of cards came tumbling down.Kevin had a choice: Do what he had always done-work harder. Or, let go of conventional thinking and learn to live by absolute faith in God. With foreclosures, lawsuits, potential homelessness, and his family looking to him for immediate answers, Kevin took the radical position of stopping every effort to survive and resting instead at the feet of Jesus.The process of living literally by faith is a gamble and one that only The Extravagant Fool for God is willing to take.The Extravagant Fool is about encountering God with an uncommon intimacy. Intimacy increases our ability to discern His voice, which leads to the revelation of who we are, what we are to do for Him on earth, and finally, the provision to carry it out. Yet none of this really takes hold without first hearing the kind of living, breathing, testimony offered by The Extravagant Fool, a man who staked his welfare-and future-entirely on the goodness of God.

Historians have long assumed that ethnic and racial divisions in post-Civil War America were reflected in the U.S. Army, of whose enlistees 40 percent were foreign-born. Now Kevin Adams shows that the frontier army was characterized by a "Victorian class divide" that overshadowed ethnic prejudices.Class and Race in the Frontier Army marks the first application of recent research on class, race, and ethnicity to the social and cultural history of military life on the western frontier. Adams draws on a wealth of military records and soldiers'' diaries and letters to reconstruct everyday army life-from work and leisure to consumption, intellectual pursuits, and political activity-and shows that an inflexible class barrier stood between officers and enlisted men.As Adams relates, officers lived in relative opulence while enlistees suffered poverty, neglect, and abuse. Although racism was ingrained in official policy and informal behavior, no similar prejudice colored the experience of soldiers who were immigrants. Officers and enlisted men paid much less attention to ethnic differences than to social class-officers flaunting and protecting their status, enlisted men seething with class resentment.Treating the army as a laboratory to better understand American society in the Gilded Age, Adams suggests that military attitudes mirrored civilian life in that era-with enlisted men, especially, illustrating the emerging class-consciousness among the working poor. Class and Race in the Frontier Army offers fresh insight into the interplay of class, race, and ethnicity in late-nineteenth-century America.