Stock car racing as we know it began in the late 1940's. Throughout the 1950's, the sport became popular across the United States. In the southern states, the 1950's saw a tremendous proliferation of small dirt tracks whose owners were hoping to ride the crest of stock car racing's building popularity. Along with the increasing number of tracks, a new breed of race driver emerged. These were primarily blue-collar men who had families to support and full-time jobs to fulfull, but whose lives often became consumed with building cars, racing and long hours of mechanical work in a never-ending search for more speed. With each passing year, more was learned about racing and the sport gradually became more sophisticated. The stories told in this book are direct from the memories of the drivers, owners, and family members of drivers who describe what it was like to be a part of the racing subculture of the era in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Hear it in their own words.
In the 1970s, when the idea of a woman competing successfully with men in any form of motorsports was radical notion, a young woman from Schenectady, New York, began her singular quest to change the chauvinistic mindset that prevailed in professional drag racing. Shirley Muldowney not only broke the gender barrier in the National Hot Rod Association, but also completely rewrote the record books in Top Fuel Eliminator, the sport's quickest and fastest category. She was the first woman ever to receive a Top Fuel license from the NHRA, and none other than "Big Daddy" Don Garlits was one of the veteran drivers who signed off on it. Between 1977 and 1982, Muldowney won three NHRA Top Fuel championships--the first female ever to win a title in any professional motorsport--and added an AHRA Top Fuel championship to her resume, as well. She won the prestigious NHRA U.S. Nationals in 1982 and, before her retirement at the end of the 2003 season, had become one of the most recognized and celebrated race car drivers in history, male or female. She was recently inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in Novi, Michigan, and has been the subject of countless features in newspapers, magazines, and network television from coast to coast. Shirley Muldowney's Tales from the Track is an unabashed collection of stories, anecdotes, and opinions in her own unvarnished style of storytelling, laced with her straightforward, take-no-prisoners approach. She has spent her entire lifetime telling it like it is, standing up to the establishment, and refusing to do anything other than in her own way. Politically correct? Hardly. Readers are encouraged to strap themselves in when she shares her manytales. It's the whole truth and nothing but the truth according to the legendary Shirley Muldowney.
What does it take to bring the entire Island of Sodor Railway System to a halt? Just a crack in the track. Well, a crack in the track and some hail on rail . . . and a toad in the road, and a fuss on the bus. In fact, one thing leads to another until just about everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Luckily, there’s a breakdown train with a couple of cranes that can fix a big mess (and they don’t mind the rain). From the Hardcover edition.
Churchill Downs is the epicenter of Kentucky's equine heritage and the most storied racetrack in the world. More than a thousand workers come to the backside of Churchill Downs on any given day during a meet. Before sunrise, seven days a week, stable hands, hot walkers, grooms, outriders, jockeys, and more tend to the well-being of the horses and the track. Most will never stand in the Winner's Circle. There could be no Kentucky Derby without their contributions.Better Lucky Than Good is the most caring, in-depth look into the lives and stories of equine workers ever published--and it was written by the people who live and work on the backside of Churchill Downs. The book's 32 authors include grooms, hot walkers, exercise riders, a clocker, an outrider, assistant trainers, a jockey, a starting gate crew member, a pony person, a horticulturist, a silks seamstress, shedrow foremen, a tack and saddle man, a security guard, a horse tattooer, trainers, an alcohol and drug abuse counselor, a farm manager, a chaplaincy associate, and many more. "Every person I know who has ever 'written a horse book,' or worked extensively as a journalist covering the world of the track, has at some point had a version of this thought: If somebody would just do a good oral history, interviewing the people who actually work with the horses--the grooms and riders and ferriers and assistant trainers, the folks on the "backside"--it would be worth 10,000 pages of even the best literary description of the sport. Now the Louisville Story Program has done this, and done it beautifully. It's no exaggeration to say that this book has needed to exist for 200 years."--John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead and Blood Horses
The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.
Drag racing icon Garlits gives a humorous and insightful first-person accountof the many memorable experiences he has lived through in his half-century ofnitromethane-fueled exploits.
Hidden in a remote place surrounded by high mountains, there lies a secret valley. There is an entrance, but you could pass by it a hundred times and still not see it... It's autumn in the hidden valley and there's a sense of change in the air. What better goodbye gift is there than a magical painting? None, of course!
Discover the magic of waking up to a bright, sunny day, the ground covered with a fresh blanket of snow. This story encourages children to use their imaginations to explore the natural world right outside their door.
