Political Hell-Raiser: The Life and Times of Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana (Hardcover)

By Marc C. Johnson

$34.95

ISBN: 9780806140858

Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now

Published: University of Oklahoma Press - March 21st, 2019

 

Burton K. Wheeler (1882-1975) may have been the most powerful politician Montana ever produced, and he was one of the most influential--and controversial--members of the United States Senate during three of the most eventful decades in American history. A New Deal Democrat and lifelong opponent of concentrated power--whether economic, military, or executive--he consistently acted with a righteous personal and political independence that has all but disappeared from the public sphere. Political Hell-Raiser is the first book to tell the full story of Wheeler, a genuine maverick whose successes and failures were woven into the political fabric of twentieth-century America. 

Wheeler came of political age amid antiwar and labor unrest in Butte, Montana, during World War I. As a crusading United States attorney, he battled Montana's powerful economic interests, championed farmers and miners, and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. There he made his name as one of the "Montana scandalmongers," uncovering corruption in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. Drawing on extensive research and new archival sources, Marc C. Johnson follows Wheeler from his early backing of Franklin D. Roosevelt and ardent support of the New Deal to his forceful opposition to Roosevelt's plan to expand the Supreme Court and, in a move widely viewed as political suicide, his emergence as the most prominent spokesman against U.S. involvement in World War II right up to three days before Pearl Harbor. 

Johnson provides the most thorough telling of Wheeler's entire career, including all its accomplishments and contradictions, as well as the political storms that the senator both encouraged and endured. The book convincingly establishes the place and importance of this principled hell-raiser in American political history. 
 

A Job You Mostly Won't Know How to Do (Hardcover)

By Pete Fromm

$26.00

ISBN: 9781640091771

Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now

Published: Counterpoint LLC - May 7th, 2019

Five-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award Pete Fromm returns with his big-hearted new novel, a love story about family and resiliency and second chances. For young couple Taz and Marnie, their fixer-upper is the symbol of their new life together: a work in progress, the beginning of something grand, all the more so when they learn a baby is on her way. But the blueprint for the perfect life eludes Taz when Marnie dies in childbirth, plummeting the taciturn carpenter headfirst into the new, strange world of fatherhood alone, a landscape of contradictions, of great joy and sorrow. With a supporting cast as rich and compelling as the wild Montana landscape, the novel follows Taz's first two years as a father--a job no one can be fully prepared for.

With more than eleven books in over twenty years, Pete Fromm has become one of the West's best literary legends. A Job You Mostly Won't Know How To Do beautifully captures people who end up building a life that is both unexpected and brave.