Grandeur of the Dooms (Sacred and Profane Adventures of a Modern American Among the English and European Aristocracy)

Travel with Luke Randolph as he meets the wackiest and most uninhibited collection of characters ever to cut a swath through the exclusive clubs and ancestral homes of the English and European upper classes. Here is a thoroughly modern, sometimes madcap, sometimes serious perspective on the social worlds of thoroughbred racing, bobsledding, foxhunting, and boar stalking, and a lifestyle that, though waning, continues to fascinate us. Grandeur of the Dooms transports the reader from the creamy shade of Buck's tent at Ascot to the search for a dissolute and dangerous Mexican jockey in a Texas border town; to St. Moritz, Switzerland, where suicidal young bloods run the Cresta on bobsleds; and to Vienna, where a young American triumphs against a five hundred pound boar with hatred and bloodlust in its eyes, only to discover that worse demons are yet to be faced. Here is a world where firelight reflects off polished brass, the Viennese snow squeaks underfoot, and skeet is shot in the drawing room.