"Sam was absolutely fearless," said Robin Williams. "Most people go to the edge and then stop. Not Sam. He'd see the edge and then just keep going. And I think that scream he was famous for was just the sound he made on his way down." Sam Kinison was Lenny Bruce at warp speed. He was not only beyond hip, he was beyond gonzo. He was a white Richard Pryor; a preacher-turned-comedian; a primal screamer who shrieked for our sins.

He was known as the "rock and roll comic" - a burly, volatile high-wire act, calculated to offend, demolishing taboos on national television with brute force.

When he lost his life in April 1992 at the age of thirty-eight, behind the wheel of a sports car east of Los Angeles, many of his fans didn't know about his past. The most successful comic of the 1980s was the son of a poor Illinois preacher - an unhappy child from a torn, dysfunctional family, plagued by low self-esteem and fated for disappointment.

This first full account of Kinison's whiplashing life is written by the person who lived closest to its subject - Sam's brother, Bill Kinison, a traveling preacher for seventeen years who gave up his vocation to manage Sam's comedy career.

Bill covers Sam's checkered early years (Sam, too, spent years as a fire-and-brimstone preacher); his sudden ascent to fame in 1985 and flamboyant life in show business; his personal struggles with liquor, drugs and sexual excess; and the feelings of a brother doomed to take care of a brother born to raise hell.

Along the road to stardom the brothers Kinison associated with Hollywood's A list, and Kinison reveals all the compromising positions and rancorous run-ins. Among the supporting cast: Arsenio Hall, Andrew Dice Clay, Elton John, Howard Stern, Lorne Michaels, Mike Ovitz, Robin Williams, David Letterman, Penny Marshall, Eddie Murphy, and a legion of rockstars, groupies, dealers, and leeches.

Kinison's outrageous comic sense and his flash-burning career symbolized the out-of-control 1980s; his fame rested on his wildness, his unaccountability. His short, haywire, supremely self-indulgent, and ultimately self-destructive life makes John Belushi's sound tempered and innocent.