(Grand Central Publishing)

www.hachettebookgroup.com

BY JOHN B. MOORE

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinners Semester at America's Holiest University (Grand Central Publishing) could not possibly have been written by anyone else.

Sure, the journalist/author Kevin Roose is a novice (he was still in college when he researched and started writing this book), but that's exactly what makes this expose on college life at an evangelical university come off genuine: Roose has none of the cynicism and practiced story-telling clichés of a longtime reporter.

The premise is so obvious, it's a wonder no one has attempted before. Surprisingly, he manages to turn out a book that's refreshingly original. Roose, a sometime Quaker from a family of Liberals is your average Left-wing kid at Brown University. A journalism student, he decides to spend a semester imbedded as a student at Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University - one of the most conservative evangelical colleges in the country. Roose didn't exactly lie about who he was, but wasn't exactly forthcoming either, saying little more than he was a transfer student from Rhode Island.

Some of the findings are predictable: Homophobia? Check. Plenty of prayer circles? You bet. Irrational understanding of how the real world works?  Is the Pope... never mind. But he also found kids who are questioning the rules they are living under. Like his hall mate from Jersey who thinks about sex 24/7, knows he will likely lose his virginity over the summer and feels immense guilt over it. Liberty even has a few Democrats (gasp).

Roose does a phenomenal job of taking a potentially one-dimensional study and adding in all the details, highlighting not only the expected, but the unforeseen as well. Roose even managed to get one of the last interviews with Falwell before the one-time Conservative kingmaker died.