The eighty-five–mile-long Columbia Gorge forms part of the border between Oregon and Washington and is one of the nation’s most historic and scenic landscapes. Many of the region’s cultural divisions boil over here—urban versus rural, west of the mountains versus east—as well as clashes over private property rights, management of public lands, and tribal treaty rights. In the early 1980s, as a new interstate bridge linked Portland to rural counties in Washington, the Gorge’s renowned vistas were on the brink of destruction. Nancy Russell, forty-eight years old and with no experience in advocacy, fundraising, or politics, built a grassroots movement that overcame seventy years of failed efforts and bitter opposition from both Oregon and Washington governors, five of the six Gorge counties, Gorge residents, and the Reagan administration. While building her campaign, Russell stopped subdivisions, factories, and government neglect through litigation brought by her organization, Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and last-second land purchases by the Trust for Public Land. Initially ignored, then demonized, Russell had her tires slashed and her life threatened. The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act barely passed—on the last day of the congressional session in 1986—and was signed by a reluctant President Reagan. Russell …

One was born in a small town in Texas, in a family with little to its name; the other, sixteen years earlier, was the grandson of a Duke whose ancestral home was one of Britain’s greatest palaces. When the Second World War began, Dwight David Eisenhower was a little-known Lt. Colonel in a United States Army which numbered under 200,000, just the 19th largest in the world. Winston Spencer Churchill was approaching his 65th birthday, with a mercurial political career that had already spanned four decades. Just a few months later, he and Britain would stand alone against a totalitarian power the likes of which the world had never seen. The leadership of Winston Churchill in the critical days of 1940 ensured that the free world would survive its greatest challenge. Four years later, it fell to Dwight Eisenhower to command the largest amphibious invasion in history. Had either of them failed, the course of modern history would have been radically different. Despite their disparate backgrounds, fate and destiny brought these men together. Sometimes they agreed and other times stood apart but together they helped determine the future of the world for much of the 20th century. Join acclaimed Churchill …