IN MEMORY OF AMERICA'S GREAT EVANGELIST.

• Position: WHAT'S NEW? - A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story - Book review

Evangelist Billy Graham would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Nov. 7. In anticipation, Zondervan, part of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Grand Rapids, Mich., released A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story by William Martin.

Graham himself requested Martin for the project and granted him unprecedented access to the Billy Graham archives and team members, lending this work authenticity and transparency.

"As I have written in this book, I have constantly examined what I have said in an effort to make sure that I was neither shading the truth in Graham's or his associates' favor out of gratitude for their helpfulness, nor taking an inappropriately negative slant as a way of emphasizing that I had not been taken in by slick manipulation, but since Billy Graham and his associates--like all humankind--have weaknesses, I determined not to gloss those over," writes Martin, the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Professor Emeritus of Religion and Public Policy in the Department of Sociology at Rice University, Houston, Texas.

"I have tried to be scrupulously fair, not only because I do not wish the taint of unfairness to mar the most notable scholarly enterprise in which I have engaged to...