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The King of the Ferret Leggers and Other True Stories collects journalist Don Katz's most fascinating profiles of people whose lives tell us something about business, adventure, sports, politics, culture, and, in a brilliant, ancillary way, ourselves.
Katz's opening story, the title piece of the audiobook, offers a hilarious yet appropriately reverential look at 72-year-old Reg Mellor, unparalleled "ferret-legging" champion of Yorkshire and the world. Other characters who populate this book include the fitness guru Jack LaLanne, the legendary entrepreneur Paul Hawken, and the master political cartoonist and inspired troublemaker Bill Mauldin.
While this collection contains portraits that are varied in scene and tone, the depiction of obsession, delusion, perseverance, creativity, and good-heartedness - the list could go on and on - remains constant. Each of these stories conveys a sense of the strangeness, wonder, and oddity of life - a theme that provides a gravitational center to this multifarious selection drawn from 20 years of an award-winning nonfiction storyteller's body of work.