See Horns & Halos, the documentary about the publishing of Fortunate Son, in Cinemax, February 18th!

A brand-new Introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, media critic and NYU Professor of Media Studies and author of The Bush Dyslexicon, and a new Preface by Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Also featuring political artwork by Seth Tobocman, author of You Don't Have to Fuck People Over to Survive and Portraits of Israelis and Palestinians.

Since 2000, Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President has been the most talked-about Bush biography, weathering a fierce storm of controversy and suppression. After original publisher St. Martin’s Press received threats from Bush campaign lawyers, and saw their author destroyed in public, they withdrew their edition of 70,000 from stores with promises to burn them. Soft Skull republished the book, but ran into corporate media (like 60 Minutes, and media "watchdog" Brill’s Content) intent on attacking the author. A Texas lawsuit shut down distribution of this critical, fair, revealing biography. Hatfield’s life became the bigger story, and the message he was trying to send seemed destined to remain unheard.

Soft Skull nevertheless released an updated second edition of Fortunate Son in June 2001, adding analyses of our "selected president" by noted historians, attorneys, and professors and a new introduction by NYU Media Professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon. Shortly thereafter, on July 17, 2001, Jim Hatfield checked himself into a motel in Arkansas and took an overdose of pills, ending his own life after experiencing what Mark Crispin Miller describes as "ruination" at the hands of "the Bush machine and a compliant corporate press."

Soft Skull is releasing our third edition of Fortunate Son, with a preface by Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and new introductory remarks from Mark Crispin Miller. Fortunate Son and the controversy surrounding its publication are also the subject of the new documentary film Horns and Halos by directors Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley. Horns and Halos has been selected as "Best Documentary" of 2002 at both the New York Underground Film Festival and the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and is an Official Selection at the 2002 Toronto and Rotterdam International Film Festivals.

As this continuing demand for and interest in the book demonstrates, Fortunate Son is a resource that provides key information to understanding not only the making of our current president, but also the machinery of American politics. "This is about a guy who stuffed his pockets and built a career on a combination of daddy’s Rolodex, political venom and rich-kid contacts," writes Greg Palast in his preface. "In reading Hatfield’s description of Bush’s rise to Governor of Texas, we see that history repeats itself with horrifying predictability: first as farce and then as Presidency." The list of what power and prestige can buy this country used to exclude our highest office. Fortunate Son and the authors whose opinions we’ve gathered for this new edition suggest that is no longer the case.

Greg Palast is an award-winning reporter for BBC Television's Newsnight and The Observer of London, and the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His website is gregpalast.com.

Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media studies at New York University. His books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV (1988) and Seeing Through Movies (1990). He is the author of The Bush Dyslexicon, published by W.W. Norton in 2001.

The late J.H. Hatfield was a journalist, a husband, a father, and the prolific author of over a half dozen books, including two biographies of twentieth-century cultural icons.