Innumerable books, articles and a full length motion picture have been written and produced about the almost unbelievable career of the magnificent race horse Phar Lap and his mysterious death. Many experts have proclaimed him to be the greatest ever. This book corrects much of the misinformation surrounding his death and opens the door to further theorizing on how and why be died.

The book studies the many mysteries of Phar Lap's career, including the infamous shooting that occurred just days before his great triumph in the 1930 Melbourne Cup. The book examines the way an emerging media played its part in building the legend. The authors provide an analysis of his previously unexplained death in North America and explain why Phar Lap is much more than a racehorse.

Tommy Woodcock spent a long lifetime with horses, but is best remembered, and loved, as the young man who strapped and looked after Australia's legendary racehorse, Phar Lap. The 1930 Melbourne Cup winner and the people's champion of the Great Depression died mysteriously - cradled by Woodcock - in the US after winning against the odds in Agua Caliente, Mexico, at his only start overseas. The horseman called Phar Lap "Bobby", and knew him best. And Woodcock is fondly known, too, as the old man, who almost 50 years on, trained the gallant Reckless, second in the 1977 Melbourne Cup and winner of the other major "two-mile" races on the Australian turf calendar at the time, the Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane Cups. Reckless is the same horse Woodcock let children ride at the track on race day, and was pictured with bunked down in the straw, on the front page of The Age newspaper. Woodcock's life story and his great and heart-breaking moments with Phar Lap and Reckless are told in his own down-to- earth words by a master storyteller, Jan Wositzky, in this updated and revised edition, with a new introduction.

While more has been written in Australia about "Big Red" than perhaps any other horse, this book is different in that it reveals a wealth of previously unknown information about Phar Lap's New Zealand background. Phar Lap: The Untold Story, covers his breeding and naming; the truth about Harry Telford's obsessive drive to buy him; an in-depth history of Harry Telford as a jockey and trainer in Australia and New Zealand, and the true story about his sad personal life; and precise details of how Phar Lap came to be purchased. Also revealed is the story of Phar Lap's passage from Australia to America via New Zealand for his ultimate success in winning the Agua Caliente Handicap and his subsequent, still mysterious death, sixteen days after that crowning achievement. Other sections deal with his most sensational victories and the reasons for the few failures in his career, the biggest of which was the 1931 Melbourne Cup, which Putt and McCord claim was an "impossible mission".

Innumerable books, articles and a full length motion picture have been written and produced about the almost unbelievable career of the magnificent race horse Phar Lap and his mysterious death. Many experts have proclaimed him to be the greatest ever. This book corrects much of the misinformation surrounding his death and opens the door to further theorizing on how and why be died.

It's 1988 and Lily Bloom, a 65-year-old American lies dying of cancer in a London hospital. As her two daughters buzz around her and the nurses pump her full of morphine, she slides in and out of consciousness, outraged that there is so little time left and so many people still to disparage.

Melbourne during the depression. A seedy, corrupt city. Someone has struck at the heart of Australia's soul: they have killed the horse that would have won the Melbourne Cup. For what motive? Profit, blackmail, a betting scam? Only Tom Pink, the rider of the murdered horse can find out. Tom, born into the underworld he now tries to defeat, exposes graft and blackmail that reaches to the upper echelons of Melbourne society. His life and the lives of those he holds close will never be the same again. The Great Melbourne Cup Mystery, written in 1933, a year after the mysterious death of Phar Lap (winner of the 1930 Melbourne Cup) is a previously lost classic of Australian crime fiction.

Phar Lap's rise to greatness in 1930 triggered extraordinary excitement across Australia but it also spooked bookmakers, who faced ruin if the wonder horse won the Melbourne Cup. Rumours were swirling: would Phar Lap be stopped, whatever the cost? They Shot Phar Lap, Didn't They? starts with a scene straight out of a Raymond Chandler whodunit, as two shadowy figures, one armed with a shotgun, try to assassinate Phar Lap on a quiet suburban backstreet. With his life in peril, the champion is spirited away to a secret location, while one of the city's most famous detectives leads the hunt for the culprits. On Cup Day, an hour before the jump, Phar Lap's whereabouts remain a mystery to the public. Finally, he arrives at the track, a huge crowd cheering him on. The police have been told to 'have their men along the rails' because the perpetrators of Saturday's attack intend to strike again. But was the 'shooting' all that it seemed? Only one thing is certain--after all he'd been through, it would take a phenomenal performance for Phar Lap to win this Cup...

Satan’s Playground chronicles the rise and fall of the tumultuous and lucrative gambling industry that developed just south of the U.S.-Mexico border in the early twentieth century. As prohibitions against liquor, horse racing, gambling, and prostitution swept the United States, the vice industry flourished in and around Tijuana, to the extent that reformers came to call the town “Satan’s Playground,” unintentionally increasing its licentious allure. The area was dominated by Agua Caliente, a large, elegant gaming resort opened by four entrepreneurial Border Barons (three Americans and one Mexican) in 1928. Diplomats, royalty, film stars, sports celebrities, politicians, patricians, and nouveau-riche capitalists flocked to Agua Caliente’s luxurious complex of casinos, hotels, cabarets, and sports extravaganzas, and to its world-renowned thoroughbred racetrack. Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Louis B. Mayer, the Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and the boxer Jack Dempsey were among the regular visitors. So were mobsters such as Bugsy Siegel, who later cited Agua Caliente as his inspiration for building the first such resort on what became the Las Vegas Strip. Less than a year after Agua Caliente opened, gangsters held up its money-car in transit to a bank in San Diego, killing the courier and a guard and stealing the company money pouch. Paul J. Vanderwood weaves the story of this heist gone wrong, the search for the killers, and their sensational trial into the overall history of the often-chaotic development of Agua Caliente, Tijuana, and Southern California. Drawing on newspaper accounts, police files, court records, personal memoirs, oral histories, and “true detective” magazines, he presents a fascinating portrait of vice and society in the Jazz Age, and he makes a significant contribution to the history of the U.S.-Mexico border.

"A work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts."—New York Times Book Review This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.