What's your greatest NASCAR memory? Bob McCullough (My Greatest Day in Baseball) posed that question to 47 drivers, owners, crew chiefs, and NASCAR officials--from Bobby Allison to Smokey Yunick--during the 1999 season. For Jeff Gordon, the answer was recent history: winning the 1999 Daytona 500 on Valentine's Day. "King" Richard Petty had to reach a bit farther back--to the 1984 win at the Firecracker 400 with then-President Reagan watching in the stands. Cale Yarborough went even further back: remembering his first career victory, the 1968 Southern 500 in Darlington--just 15 miles from where he was born and raised. No matter the vintage, the stories offer up an intimate perspective on the world's fastest-growing sport. "Awesome Bill from Dawsonville" Elliott, Dale and Ned Jarrett, Benny and Phil Parsons, Bobby and Terry Labonte, Bobby and Donny Allison--all the greats of stock-car racing are here. My Greatest Day in NASCAR is essential reading for NASCAR fans. --M. Stein
From Library Journal
Here McCullough collects 41 interviews with personalities involved in some way with NASCAR stock car racing; in each, he asked his interviewee (mostly drivers--the famous and not so famous) to recall his most memorable day in the sport. As is common with oral accounts, the quality of content is uneven; some accounts read very well, while others ramble or assume a knowledge of events that readers may not know. Collectively, however, the book offers a sense of the thrill of achievement--and some accounts evoke a particularly poignant moment, like Ned Jarrett's television broadcast of his son's victory in the Daytona 500. This is not a book for non-fans trying to understand the sport but for those who are already hooked; it's a book for people who are already fans--although disappointingly, a few notables, whose voices fans would want to hear (like Richard Petty), are absent from these pages. Not a necessary purchase, this book is appropriate for public libraries.
-David B. Van De Streek, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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