Nonfiction travels from NASCAR to rodeos

Some are quick to dismiss nonfiction as not right for summer reading, seeking out instead a good novel or light and fluffy beach book. But I view summer as the perfect time to dive into another world without ever leaving home.

Stretching out on my backyard lounge chair, I swab on the SPF 30 and disappear into the dust and dirt of a rodeo, or test my brain against others at a crossword-puzzle tournament, or even shiver at the cold-bloodedness of a murderer. Even topics that seem at first far from my circle, like NASCAR, the topic of Jeff MacGregor's gripping "Sunday Money," are fascinating in the hands of an expert author. I hope you'll find something you'll enjoy in our varied roundup of reviews.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

Need for speed
Outside of short glimpses in bars, restaurants and other places where the TV is not under my control, I've never watched a NASCAR race. But once I read even one page of Jeff MacGregor's "Sunday Money: A Hot Lap Around America with NASCAR" (HarperCollins, $26). I was strapped in tight, circling the track at 200 miles per hour, unable to put the book down.

MacGregor is a contributor to Sports Illustrated, and together with his wife, a photographer, rents a motorhome and travels the nation for one NASCAR season, following the sport that has "more fans than Turkey has Turks or Great Britain Brits," as MacGregor puts it, and "where there are as many ways to die as parts on the car."

Even if NASCAR isn't your speed, MacGregor's colorful, original language and knack for finding the perfect detail will keep you riveted. He describes a distinguished-looking car owner as looking "like the U.S. ambassador to Cary Grant." The hair color alone of a worker at the Richard Petty Driving Experience inspires him to go on and on for a page and a half speculating about the man's life. Like NASCAR, MacGregor's book never stops, never slows down, never lets up, but unlike NASCAR, there aren't endless hours during which absolutely nothing is happening.

MacGregor and wife criss-cross the nation from track to track, but less time is spent on the specifics of each race than on NASCAR as a whole. Readers learn of its short history, how it's forever tangled with the American South, and how attempts to corporatize it may ensure its monetary success while destroying the loyalty of its core fans. Yet none of that's presented in biz-school gobbledygook. It's as entertaining and lively, packed with examples and anecdotes and written by a sharp mind with a gentle hand.  Put yourself on the fast track to the bookstore to buy "Sunday Money."    —G.F.C.

Befriending the murderer
The Christian Longo murder case was at least as horrific as the Laci Peterson case, quite possibly more so. Longo, deep in debt and with police after him for check fraud and car theft, murdered his wife, MaryJane, and their three young children, dumped them in water, and fled to Mexico. While on the run, Longo stole the identity of Michael Finkel, a writer for the New York Times who had just been fired for creating a composite character. When Finkel finds out, he sees in this odd happening a chance to redeem himself, perhaps, to tell an honest story this time.

The resulting book, "True Story" (HarperCollins, $26), is both a gripping true-crime tale and an odd psychological experiment. Finkel knows that Longo killed his family, and brutally. Yet he courts the jailed killer, staying home to answer his calls, exchanging letters (Longo writes enormous letters to Finkel, sometimes 50+ pages long), attending his trial. At times he has to sweettalk Longo to keep working on what he dubs "the Chris and Mike project."

He does get the goods. The story of Longo's decline is painfully told and absorbing, though Finkel seems to rely almost totally on Longo's own version, not interspersing interviews with MaryJane's family or others. Chapters in which Finkel mixes reflections on how he came to falsify the Times story that got him fired are interesting to journalists, but perhaps distracting to other readers. Just when it seems Longo's creepy tale is gaining speed, readers are jerked back to Finkel's own musings.

Could Finkel have written the definitive true-crime tale on the Longo case? I think so. Was it possible for him to write that story without interspersing it with his own? I wonder. He might have been criticized for doing just that, leaving out the eerily intimate relationship he had with a murderer. (According to Publisher's Weekly, editors cut a lot of Finkel's own story from the book.)

"True Story" is an unsettling read, and Longo's case will stay with you long after you close the book. I don't know if it exorcised Finkel's ghosts, but it seems a more valuable work than, say, Stephen Glass' thinly fictionalized "The Fabulist."    —G.F.C.

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