Sunday Money: Speed! Lust! Madness! Death!
A Hot Lap Around America with NASCAR

Smart, funny and profane, SUNDAY MONEY is the kaleidoscopic account of an entire season on the NASCAR circuit.

NASCAR racing, once considered no more than a regional circuit of moonshiners pounding battered sedans around low-country dirt tracks in a choking cloud of red dust and cliche, has somehow become the fastest growing spectator sport in America -- and the buxom, bumpkin darling of Madison Avenue. A 200-mile-an-hour traveling tent and revival show; a platinum-plated, multibillion dollar V-8 hero machine, it is second only to football in national television ratings. With 75 million fans and its popularity soaring in every corner of the country, NASCAR is a sports entertainment empire built at the very crossroads of pop culture, commerce and American mythology. Author Jeff MacGregor's SUNDAY MONEY: Speed! Lust! Madness! Death! A Hot Lap Around America with NASCAR (HarperCollins; May 2005; $25.95) is an unprecedented behind-the-scenes chronicle of America's loudest pastime, profiling the lives of the superstar drivers, their crews and their fans across the grinding reach of a 40-week season.

In the tradition of On the Road, Travels with Charley and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, SUNDAY MONEY is also a snapshot of American culture -- of race, religion, class, sex, money, politics and fame -- taken from the window of a moving car.

Driving 48,000 miles in ten months in a tiny motorhome, MacGregor and his wife, award-winning photographer Olya Evanitsky, covered 36 races at 23 tracks in 18 states, from Daytona to Darlington, New Hampshire to California, and from the Wal-Mart to the Waldorf. But SUNDAY MONEY is much more than the book NASCAR doesn't want you to read about a season spent inside the stock-car circuit. It is history and comedy and tragedy, the story of a hundred stories; of red states and blue, of holy war and holy fools, of splendid Rebel lizards and golden Yankee hotshoes, of mystic true believers and their endless roll of honored ghosts. It is the story of our national search for meaning -- and a brilliantly observed, keenly rendered and darkly comic portrait of America.

Read an Excerpt

Release Date: May 1, 2005; Publisher: HarperCollins.
ISBN: 0060094710; Hardcover: 400 pages.


 






   

 




 


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