"Clay's mission to St. Petersburg, when all the world was our foe, will always remain one of the most spectacular passages in Russian American Friendship." Joseph Freeman, Life Magazine, August 27, 1945. "This man (Clay) is certainly the most wonderful ass of the age. . . It is prosperity that has developed the fearful underlying vanity that poisons his whole character." William H. Seward, secretary of state in President Abraham Lincoln's cabinet. "He was a man such as the world sees but once and a character known to all. He, more than any other man, stood for the world's idea of a...

This new biography provides a startlingly different picture of Mary Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln's wife. Preconceived myths about the former first lady are factually disproved. At times her judgment was faulty; in other instances it was brilliant. After her 1861 refurbishing of the Executive Mansion, she made no further furnishings purchases, only replacement items. The furniture she purchased is still in use and the Lincoln bed is well known. Committed to an insane asylum by her only surviving son, she organized, while under constant scrutiny, her friends in a skillfully successful...

The book begins with the nation's first organized, sanctioned stock car road race over the Briarcliff, New York, course--staged in 1908 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, in 1908. 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. The book is based, for the most part, on statements of drivers, car owners and others garnered from...