Among the runners of C. C. Pyle's First Annual International Transcontinental Foot Race were an assortment of underdogs, including twenty-year-old Oklahoman and part Cherokee Andy Payne, who wanted to win over the girl of his dreams and pay off the mortgage on his family's farm; Paul "Hardrock" Simpson, who was in over his head but couldn't let down his North Carolina hometown; Mike Kelly, a luckless boxer from Indiana; Seattle's Ed Gardner, one of four black runners who encountered bigotry; Charles Hart, a sixty-three-year-old Englishman hoping his best days weren't behind him; and Frank Johnson, a middle-aged husband, father, and steelworker from St. Louis who broke away from his humdrum life and dared to do something different. Newspaper and magazine journalist Geoff Williams details this historic event and the colorful cast of characters involved, based on firsthand accounts of those who were there and interviews from many living descendants. C. C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race is a classic American story so astonishing and surreal that you have to hear it to believe it. Pyle, a sports agent and promoter, came up with the idea of a footrace (mockingly known as the Bunion Derby) from Los Angeles to New York that promised $48,500 in cash, including $25,000 to the first-place winner. For a $125 entry fee, male participants got the chance for a nice payday while subjecting themselves to harsh weather, primitive housing and Pyle's ego and shady business practices. They also had to run 3,500 miles over 84 days (the equivalent of 40 miles a day) long before comfortable running shoes and sophisticated sports nutrition. Williams, a contributor to Entrepreneur magazine, has evocatively recreated a long-forgotten sports event, mixing colorful anecdotes from the race with vivid portraits of the runners. There's Brother John, a bearded zealot who raced in a sackcloth, and 20-year-old Andy Payne, a part-Cherokee Oklahoman who competed to pay off his family's farm and to win the attention of the girl he loved. What could have been one long injury report or a sappy piece of nostalgic nuttiness is a breezy, entertaining read that properly balances the runners' integrity with the comedy of errors that was Pyle's grand experiment and his life. --Publishers Weekly On March 4, 1928, 199 men set off from Los Angeles on foot. Their destination: New York City. It was the Bunion Derby, perhaps the most grueling contest in the golden age of endurance competitions, an era when dancing, flagpole sitting, eating, and even coffee drinking turned into tests of will. The race was the brainchild of huckster C. C. Pyle, who shares the focus of this fascinating account with some of the racers (especially young Andy Payne, who entered the derby in the name of true love). In a broader sense, though, author Williams tells the story of pre-Depression America, when the world seemed an exciting place, and when the horizon was bright. The race was an exhausting, punishing event (amazingly, more than 50 racers finished it), and Williams recounts the story with gusto, giving us a real sense of the physical and mental toll the competition took on its participants. Pyle comes off as a likable rogue, a classic Roaring Twenties, get-rich-quick kind of guy. The book is like a time capsule and an extremely entertaining one at that. --Booklist Geoff Williams, a freelance writer from Ohio, meticulously and brilliantly captures the roughly 2,000-mile journey and the larger-than-life characters over 328 pages in C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America...The result is a fine, unlikely and intimate journey into the American past, across the deserts, mountains and plains with heroes bearing wild aspirations long since gone. --The Washington Post Geoff Williams is a freelance journalist who regularly writes for U.S. News & World Report and has written for numerous publications, including CNNMoney.com, Life and Reuters. He is also the author of Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever. He lives with his two daughters in Loveland, Ohio.