Horns and Halos

Horns and Halos is a fascinating, unexpectedly tragic story about one man's downfall in the brutal world of perception-driven media and politics. In the late 1990s, author James Hatfield wrote Fortunate Son, a biography of then-candidate George W. Bush that alleged, among other things, that the future president used cocaine during the '70s. St. Martin's Press fast-tracked the project, but recalled the book when Hatfield's earlier prison time for murder conspiracy became known. Horns and Halos follows what happened next: Fortunate Son was picked up by tiny Soft Skull Press, run by a passionate, Mohawk-topped young man named Sander Hicks, but the long, uphill battle to restore credibility to the work proves ruinous.