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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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