This penetrating, freewheeling biography - based on previously inaccessible primary sources - is a significant contribution to the history of journalism and of small-town Kansas. Readers will find that it has both universal and regional appeal for its portrayal of the quiet but sometimes intense conflict between a famous newspaper-editor father, William Allen White, and his son, William Lindsay White, who would become equally successful as a syndicated journalist based in New York.

World War II correspondent William Lindsay White achieved national prominence in the 1940s and 1950s with his syndicated newspaper column "Take a Look," his CBS radio broadcasts from the Finno-Russian front, his magazine reports (particularly as a roving editor of Reader's Digest), and several best-sellers, including They Were Expendable, Journey for Margaret, and Back Down the Ridge.

Few of his readers knew that back in Kansas some citizens regarded "Young Bill" and later his wife, Kathrine, as radical and eccentric in their efforts to distinguish themselves from Bill's father - the ebullient, yet teetotalling, "Conscience of the Middle West" - and his wife, Young Bill's mother, Sallie.