The first major candidate for the presidency to seriously challenge the wealth and power of the financial oligarchy since Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and JFK's short-lived presidency, Senator Bernie Sanders has spent nearly 45 years in politics fighting on behalf of poor and working-class citizens. A sharp and insightful critic of the myriad failures of laissez-faire capitalism, a mythical economic philosophy fostered during the Reagan Era resulting in policies that have continued to coddle the rich while leaving millions of Americans perilously outside of the rapidly shrinking middle-class, the intrepid and forward-looking Vermont lawmaker is the only presidential candidate speaking hard truths about the economic realities facing most Americans eight years after the devastating 2008 financial meltdown of Wall Street's making. From his initial campaign for the U.S. Senate on the tiny Liberty Union ticket in the winter of 1972 to his current bid for the White House, this meticulously-detailed and thoroughly researched biography clearly illustrates how Battling Bernie - the voice of the country's better self - has spent a lifetime consistently fighting for America's poor and downtrodden, as well as the vanishing middle class.