The Mongoose as Showman

We'll be posting later today about the best books we read in 2009, but we thought we'd start the day by shouting out a book sure to be atop our to-read list for the coming months: Snake vs. Mongoose: How a Rivalry Changed Drag Racing Forever.

Drag racing owes much of its current success to that rivalry, which pitted Tom "Mongoose" McEwen against Don "Snake" Prudhomme throughout much of the late sixties and early seventies. When the two men started going at it on the strip, drag racing was...