Phil Fish, aka Kingfish, is about to find out he has a lot to learn. He's just an average guy who can't seem to catch a break. Life's not turning out the way he'd hoped. Until, that is, he gets some valuable advice from a mysterious lady and her tiny dog. This advice leads Phil to meet a prophetic mechanic, a dreamer on a four-wheeling beer cooler, an Asian named Bubba with a penchant for rock necklaces, and other memorable characters while he discovers what he should be when he grows up. The Kingfish Way explains the journey we're all on and how some of us have gotten off the path. The cast of characters in this wildly entertaining tale will make you smile and remember what your dreams once were and maybe - just maybe - how you can make them a reality.

Phil Fish, aka Kingfish, is about to find out he has a lot to learn. He's just an average guy who can't seem to catch a break. Life's not turning out the way he'd hoped. Until, that is, he gets some valuable advice from a mysterious lady and her tiny dog.

Chronicling his meteoric rise to power and allegations of corruption, Thomas O. Harris's The Kingfish tells of Huey P. Long's many social reforms, which endeared him to the rural poor and made him an enemy of big business. Long was a man who, through hard work and perseverance, surpassed all boundaries previously aligned with American politicians. Harris very vividly points out the overall danger of Long's politics and his underlying selfish motives. He calls Long a dictator and a threat to the American political system but finds it hard to deny the many reasons for Long�s immense popularity within Louisiana.

The controversial, almost mythic Louisiana politician Huey P. Long inspired not just one but six American novels, published between 1934 and 1946. And he continues to resonate in American cultural memory, appearing in a 1995 work of historical fiction. The Kingfish in Fiction offers the first study of all six “Hueys-who-aren’t-Hueys” as they strut and bluster their way across the literary page, each character with his own particular story, each towing a different authorial agenda. Keith Perry carefully dissects the intertwining of documented history and artistic invention in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Hamilton Basso’s Cinnamon Seed and Sun in Capricorn, John Dos Passos’s Number One, Adria Locke Langley’s A Lion Is in the Streets, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Perry explains that Lewis cast his version of the Kingfish as a totalitarian menace, a sort of homegrown Hitler, in what Lewis later admitted was an unapologetic attempt to sabotage Long’s designs on the White House. Basso, one of Long’s most vocal detractors, created two Long-based characters, each a rabble-rousing affront to what remained of the Old South order. To warn readers of the dangers hidden in the politician-constituent contract, Dos Passos transformed Long into a shameless manipulator of the gullible American masses. Langley’s rendition suffers complete condemnation by its creator for personal as well as public transgressions. Warren’s spellbinding Willie Stark, almost as much philosopher as politician, ironically bears the least resemblance to Long though for almost six decades Stark has been Long’s best-known fictional embodiment. Exploring how and why these five authors—among them, a Nobel laureate, one of America’s most celebrated political novelists, and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner—turned one politician into six fictional characters leads Perry to conclude that Huey P. Long’s lasting impression may well be a composite of both historical and imaginative interpretation.

Congressional Pathfinders: “First” Members of Congress and How They Shaped American History discusses those men and women whose service in the United States Congress, as improbable as it was, marked a turning point in history. To be the first black American or the first woman to serve in a largely white, male-dominated institution requires a level of moral courage seldom found in ordinary people. To be openly gay, to subscribe to the Muslim faith in a nation often fearful and ignorant of Islam, or to navigate the hallways of power with physical disabilities is to be cognizant of one’s separateness. To be an “other” is to feel the stigma of that difference, and yet to persevere is to forge a path for later generations of others to follow. The service of these courageous men and women forever changed Congress and, by extension, the nation: they truly were congressional pathfinders. Nancy Pelosi, Daniel Inouye, Margaret Chase Smith, Shirley Chisholm, Ilhan Omar, and Hillary Clinton are among the many figures profiled in Congressional Pathfinders.

From the moment he took office as governor in 1928 to the day an assassin’s bullet cut him down in 1935, Huey Long wielded all but dictatorial control over the state of Louisiana. A man of shameless ambition and ruthless vindictiveness, Long orchestrated elections, hired and fired thousands at will, and deployed the state militia as his personal police force. And yet, paradoxically, as governor and later as senator, Long did more good for the state’s poor and uneducated than any politician before or since. Outrageous demagogue or charismatic visionary? In this powerful new biography, Richard D. White, Jr., brings Huey Long to life in all his blazing, controversial glory. White taps invaluable new source material to present a fresh, vivid portrait of both the man and the Depression era that catapulted him to fame. From his boyhood in dirt-poor Winn Parish, Long knew he was destined for power–the problem was how to get it fast enough to satisfy his insatiable appetite. With cunning and crudity unheard of in Louisiana politics, Long crushed his opponents in the 1928 gubernatorial race, then immediately set about tightening his iron grip. The press attacked him viciously, the oil companies howled for his blood after he pushed through a controversial oil processing tax, but Long had the adulation of the people. In 1930, the Kingfish got himself elected senator, and then there was no stopping him. White’s account of Long’s heyday unfolds with the mesmerizing intensity of a movie. Pegged by President Roosevelt as “one of the two most dangerous men in the country,” Long organized a radical movement to redistribute money through his Share Our Wealth Society–and his gospel of pensions for all, a shorter workweek, and free college spread like wildfire. The Louisiana poor already worshiped him for building thousands of miles of roads and funding schools, hospitals, and universities; his outrageous antics on the Senate floor gained him a growing national base. By 1935, despite a barrage of corruption investigations, Huey Long announced that he was running for president. In the end, Long was a tragic hero–a power addict who squandered his genius and came close to destroying the very foundation of democratic rule. Kingfish is a balanced, lucid, and absolutely spellbinding portrait of the life and times of the most incendiary figure in the history of American politics.