Horns and Halos captures the unlikely connection of three men - a U.S. president, a discredited author and an underground publisher - whose paths to power and popularity become tangled in a book.

In October 1999, a short article appeared in the New York Times: St. Martin's Press recalled Fortunate Son, the first published biography of George W. Bush. At the time of its recall, the book was #8 on Amazon.com's best-seller list - no doubt due to the book's widely publicized allegations that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession in 1972. However, Bush wasn't the only one with a hidden past. Citing distrust of the author, J. H. Hatfield, the publisher pulled the book from stores after learning that he was a convicted felon.

Several weeks later, small underground imprint Soft Skull Press, the self-styled "punk of publishing," announced that it would re-publish the book. But getting Fortunate Son back on the shelves wouldn't prove so easy. Operating out of a tenement basement on New York City's Lower East Side, 29-year-old founder Sander Hicks struggled without significant success for over a year to get the book back into stores and into the national consciousness. After months of lawsuits, bad press, and disagreements with the distributor, Soft Skull made one final desperate attempt to make a splash at the 2001 Book Expo of America. Against the author's wishes, Hicks revealed the sources for the book's cocaine allegations, which leads to electrifying consequences.