Böcker av Conger Beasley

While living in Denver in the early 1890s, Francis Schlatter, a poor immigrant cobbler from Alsace-Lorraine, heard a voice inside his head that told him to put down his tools and go outside and walk east. For several years Schlatter, a deeply pious man, had been aware that he possessed the potential to cure people of their afflictions if he could only muster enough faith; the time to test that faith had arrived. So began a grueling two-year journey on foot that took him as far east as Hot Springs, Arkansas, then back across the Southwest to San Diego, north to San Francisco, then east to Arizona and New Mexico. In the summer and fall of 1895, first in Albuquerque then in Denver, he began to treat hundreds of people a day. Word of his miraculous power ran like wildfire all over the Southwest. Appalled by the carnival atmosphere he encountered in Denver, Schlatter slipped away into the wilds of New Mexico, finally into Old Mexico, where he died under mysterious circumstances in the spring of 1897. Charlatan or saint? Healer or fraud? The question remains. Even his detractors acknowledged the genuine compassion that people felt in his presence. Most telling was the fact that he never took a dime for the therapies he performed. A hundred years ago Francis Schlatter was one of the best-known figures in the Southwest; since then he has literally fallen off the map. In this gripping and powerful narrative, based on contemporary newspaper accounts and a memoir that Schlatter dictated to a friend before he died in Mexico, Conger Beasley, Jr. reconstructs the life and times of this remarkable man.

Hoby Tibbs, a forty-one-year-old hamburger cook, has a secret-he has the power to cure bad hamburger meat. His gift is timely-an epidemic of ptomaine poisoning has infected the hamburger parlors of the American Southwest that threatens to alter the eating habits of the entire population. With the grit and determination of a latter-day knight, Hoby rides forth to do battle with the pernicious microbes. In pursuit of this quest, he discovers the ptomaine outbreak is not the product of natural causes, but rather part of a devious plot by fast-food moguls to corner the franchise industry. This discovery turns into an exciting chase that brings this fast-paced, action-filled, comic-fantasy adventure to a shocking and surprising conclusion. CONGER BEASLEY, JR. was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, and educated in Connecticut and New York City. From 1970 to 1982 he worked as an editor at Universal Press Syndicate and Andrews and McMeel Publishing Company in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to "The Ptomaine Kid," "Hidalgo''s Beard," and "Messiah: The Life and Times of Francis Schlatter," all from Sunstone Press, he has published three books of poetry, and three volumes of short fiction. A collection of essays, "Sun Dancers and River Demons," was given the Thorpe Menn Award for the best book published by a Kansas City author in 1991. "We Are a People in This World: The Lakota Sioux and the Massacre at Wounded Knee" won the Western Writers of America Spur Award for the best contemporary nonfiction book published in 1995.