PRAISE FOR THE SUNFLOWER SINNER

Paul Lackie’s greatest ambition was to become governor of Kansas, but he hitched his wagon to the wrong political stars. The reminiscence by Cynthia Dennis is at once a tribute and indictment of Lackie, her politician father. Her book offers a true life literary coming-of-age story, and a bittersweet memoir of a forgotten time in Kansas.

Roy Bird
Director, Kansas Center for the Book
State Library of Kansas

THE SUNFLOWER SINNER tells what we always wonder when we read of political scandal: what it felt like to be in the family as the public drama developed. It’s a moving story of a daughter’s deepening disappointment in her father and a cautionary tale for citizens about razzle-dazzle pols.

Margaret Dawe
Chair, Department of English
Wichita State University

In her first book, veteran journalist Cynthia Dennis has chosen to chronicle the most difficult subject: her family. This ambitious memoir tugs at you in ways that you never expect. Sometimes touching, often alarming, always revealing, one comes away from it with a view of family life that is all too familiar – and all too uncomfortable.

I could not put this book down.

The surprising centerpieces of this absorbing drama are Dennis’s father, Paul A. Lackie, who yearns to be a star in the theater that was Kansas Republican politics in the 1950s, and Annas Brown, a squat, earthy woman who botched an illegal abortion in Hutchinson, Kan. Inexplicably, their lives intersect and scorch everyone they touch – Lackie’s wife and three daughters, Freddie Hall, the former governor of Kansas, and Mack Nations, Hall’s executive secretary.

As Dennis unpeels the lives of Lackie and her mother, a striking woman who traded in a free-spirited lifestyle for conventional motherhood, she uncovers a nest of heartache. Her father espouses traditional politics, prominence and power, while living a double life with the bottle and in the bed of other women. Her mother despises politics, but runs the family with the rigor of a first lady whose children should never misbehave. Dennis, the eldest daughter, finds herself ensnared in the web of her father’s lies and cannot escape.

Dennis adroitly moves the story along, aided, no doubt, by her finely honed skills as a reporter. As I read this book, I marveled at how she was able to stay focused on the task, given the wrenching events that marked her childhood.

Jim Slocum
Former Publisher
Kalmbach Publishing Co.

This fascinating and beautifully told story through the eyes of a growing daughter (it is also her story) chronicles the rise and ultimate fall in a murky corruption scandal of a talented, flawed, and politically ambitious small town lawyer who saw it as his destiny to become governor of Kansas.

Lawrence H. Larsen
Professor Emeritus in History
University of Missouri – Kansas City