A Long Shot To Glory

The great myth of horse racing is that the game is the regal and royal Sport of Kings. It isn't. Not by a long shot. Anyone who doubts this need look no further than Suffolk Downs, a once-proud racecourse graced in its glory years by boisterous throngs and champions such as Seabiscuit. Now the blue-collar East Boston track is one of many that have fallen on hard times. These days "Sufferin' Downs" is where grizzled Thoroughbreds come to end their careers, hopeful young jockeys aspire against daunting odds to begin them, and diehard fans cheer, curse and gamble on the entire fascinating spectacle. These bit players are not just cogs of a single, struggling horse track. They are the unseen supporting cast for a 15 billion betting industry. In fifteen years as a racing reporter and press box personality, T.D. Thornton gained access to remote corners of racetrack life off limits to the general public. He got to know the raucously Runyonesque characters and the quirky personalities of the horses; he learned the tricks of the trade from trainers, owners, and jockeys; he witnessed the tragedies and small triumphs of racing lives lived below the radar. One recent season, he finally decided to write it all down. Not by a Long Shot is a deeply textured portrait of an industry where even the best in the business lose 75 percent of the time.

Sometimes life is like a movie. There are moments and events in life - not often - that are as exciting and as dramatic as a movie. What happened in Lake Placid, New York in February 1980 at the Thirteenth Winter Olympics was such a time. For those who experienced it in person or watched the games on television, they remember where they were when the US hockey team beat the Soviet Union and then beat the team from Finland two days later to win the gold medal. The sports victory of an underdog group of college kids was thrilling enough but it was a win against the Soviet Union. This Cold War adversary was also the nation hosting the summer games later that year which the United States was threatening to boycott. The excitement and drama in Lake Placid gave the games a huge lift of enthusiasm and popularity when some had even come to believe that staging the Olympics was no longer affordable for many communities and that perhaps the 1980 Winter Games should be cancelled entirely. Indeed, as the games began, a US News and World Report magazine questioned whether the Lake Placid games were the "last Olympics." What happened on the hockey ice was improbable enough, but the Lake Placid Winter Games were a long shot, if not a miracle too. Winning the games had been an unlikely decades-long quest for this small town to overcome the barriers of exploding finances, environmental concerns and world politics. Few remember that the 1980 games were never supposed to take place in Lake Placid. They came to the small village because of unexpected events which unfolded and made the two weeks in the remote Adirondacks before a worldwide audience of nearly a billion viewers one of the most dramatic times in the modern era of sports, media and politics. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that the Lake Placid Games, which brought the "Miracle on Ice," saved the Winter Olympics in 1980 and greatly enhanced them for the future.

The storytelling gifts of Coleen W. Cain are her gifts to you. When she conceived of this book, Ms. Cain had the idea that these quick stories would help travelers pass away the time on the airplane, in airports, or during those passive waiting periods that occur in ordinary business dealings. There are 115 stories in this softcover volume, yet it fits in your breifcase or handbag. Here's a typical story about Georgia Hempel who was upset with glorious thoughts while she awaited her husband's arrival from work. It's called, "Shining With Secrets." At three o'clock that afternoon the doctor had assured her she was pregnant with triplets. But how had that happened? Someone in the Gynocology Clinic must have impregnated her with sperm of a donor instead of giving her a biopsy. Husband Don laughed outloud when she told him. The couple had a secret between them. He was impotent and they had agreed it was best to let it remain so. The stories average about 300 words each, are quick and to the point. They were written in ten or five minute flashes each and come to you unedited, just as the author wrote them. They contain humor, wisdom and irony from Ms. Cain's travels across the United States, China, and Fantasis Land. Good for revealing the American soul and stimulating your own imagination. Also, 115 JET STORIES FOR YOUR BRIEFCASE makes a unique gift for your friends.

E-artnow presents to you the ultimate Zane Grey collection, a book set consisting of the most notable novels and stories by this great author of the Western genre. Zane Grey,played a significant role in shaping the myths of the Wild West and paved the way for the western genre as one of its pioneers and the greatest writers of the genre. This edition includes: Betty Zane The Spirit of the Border The Last of the Plainsmen The Last Trail The Heritage of the Desert The Young Forester The Young Lion Hunter Riders of the Purple Sage Desert Gold The Light of the Western Stars The Rustlers of Pecos County The Lone Star Ranger Rainbow Trail The Border Legion Wildfire The UP Trail The Desert of Wheat The Man of the Forest The Mysterious Rider To the Last Man Tales of Lonely Trails Wanderer of the Wasteland Tappan's Burro The Call of the Canyon Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon The Thundering Herd The Vanishing American Under the Tonto Rim Captives of the Desert Wild Horse Mesa The Deer Stalker From Missouri The Great Slave Yaqui Tigre The Rubber Hunter The Ranger Canyon Walls Avalanche Forlorn River Nevada The Shepherd of Guadaloupe Sunset Pass Arizona Ames Robbers' Roost The Drift Fence The Hash Knife Outfit The Code of the West Thunder Mountain The Trail Driver West of the Pecos Raiders of Spanish Peaks Knights of the Range Thirty Thousand on the Hoof Twin Sombreros Majesty's Rancho The Wilderness Trek Valley of Wild Horses Lost Pueblo Black Mesa Stranger from the Tonto The Fugitive Trail Arizona Clan Stairs of Sand The Lost Wagon Train Shadow on the Trail The Maverick Queen The Dude Ranger Wyoming Horse Heaven Hill Fighting Caravans Western Union

The first organized, sanctioned American stock car race took place in 1908 on a road course around Briarcliff, New York--staged by one of America's early speed mavens, William K. Vanderbilt, Jr. A veteran of the early Ormond-Daytona Beach speed trials, Vanderbilt brought the Grand Prize races to Savannah, Georgia, the same year. What began as a rich man's sport eventually became the working man's sport, finding a home in the South with the infusion of moonshiners and their souped-up cars. Based in large part on statements of drivers, car owners and others garnered from archived newspaper articles, this history details the development of stock car racing into a megasport, chronicling each season through 1974. It examines the National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing's 1948 incorporation documents and how they differ from the agreements adopted at NASCAR's organization meeting two months earlier. The meeting's participants soon realized that their sport was actually owned by William H.G. "Bill" France, and its consequential growth turned his family into billionaires. The book traces the transition from dirt to asphalt to superspeedways, the painfully slow advance of safety measures and the shadowy economics of the sport.

In the climactic closing months of World War II, Allied Intelligence officers are summoned to the Malcañan Palace in Manila to be briefed by General MacArthur’s Intelligence Staff on the optimal conclusion to the conflict in the Pacific Theater. Intelligence collected at the time concluded that the Americans had only three options to effectively force the Imperial Japanese Military into surrender: encirclement, blockade, and bombardment; isolating Japan from its forces in China, Korea, and Formosa; or engaging Japan through a full-scale amphibious invasion. In the debut novel by Michael Dana Kennedy, Japanese-American Lt. Ken Kobayashi must straddle a delicate line between duty to country and honor to his family as he is assigned by General MacArthur to infiltrate the Imperial Japanese Army in the lead-up to an invasion of the Japanese archipelago. From the deck of the U.S.S. Yorktown to the halls of the Imperial Ministry of War in Ichigaya in Tokyo, The Flowers of Edo reveals the intricacies of the military machine and the human and cultural price that was paid in the bombings on Japan through a perspective never before seen in fiction. Meticulously researched and endorsed by military insiders and historians from both sides of the Pacific, Lt. Kobayashi’s tale of espionage and romance will shed new light on what might have happened.