George Cory and Douglass Cross wrote just one song that was successful. They were unknown before they wrote it, and unknown after it became a hit. Until now. Their lives were a tangle: They eked out a meager living, in San Francisco and Brooklyn, for fifteen years before Tony Bennett serendipitously came across "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," the song that had languished for almost a decade. Bennett's recording revived his career, and made the songwriters enormously rich. But wealth didn't beget happiness. Cory and Cross broke up, Cross drank himself to death and Cory, widely believed to be a suicide, died from drinking as well. There's a statue in front of an iconic hotel in San Francisco that honors the song. It's Tony Bennett's statue. Cory and Cross don't even have a street sign.

Bill Hartack won the Kentucky Derby five times, and seemed to hate every moment of it. ""If only Bill could have gotten along with people the way he got along with horses,"" a trainer said. His tragic, impoverished upbringing didn't help: his mother was killed in an automobile accident; the family home burned down; his father was murdered by a girlfriend; and he was estranged from his sisters. Larry King, his friend, said it was just as well the termperamental Hartack never married, because it wouldn't have lasted. Hartack became one of racing's most accomplished jockeys. But he was inveterate grouch and worked at giving the press a hard time. At 26, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Whenever the media tried to bury him, he would win another Derby. At the end of his life, he was found alone in a solitary cabin in the Texas hinterlands. Drawn from dozens of interviews and conversations with family members, friends and enemies, this book provides a full account of Hartack's turbulent life.