Professional Cycling

David Gross is working as a corporate lawyer in New York when he gets a call from a friend inviting him to move to Bologna to help turn around a legendary Italian motorcycle company, known for its dominance on the track and its inability to turn a profit. Off he heads to the fabled home of marbled meats, radical leftist politics, and bespoke shoes, diving into his new life as the "corporate image consultant" to gearheads while learning to navigate the giddy mores of Bolognese society.

If you are a successful, career-driven professional, it’s likely that along with the sense of pride that comes with your unparalleled impact in your industry, you’ve also experienced stress, burnout, exhaustion. Pressure Makes Diamonds: Simple Habits for Busy Professionals to Break the Burnout Cycle is your quick, comprehensive guide to reshaping your perspective, becoming focused on how you want to move forward, and using the obstacles that have cut you down in the past to lift you up, so you can shine as the talented, multifaceted person you are purposed to be.

When more than 100 men or women go racing down a road, inches away from each other, in all weather, over all kinds of roads, the opportunity for a brilliant win or a terrible accident is always there. For more than a century, bicycle racers have sought glory, but have often found only misery. There can be only one winner, and even that triumph can be mixed with terrible loss. Fausto Coppi, coached by a blind man, set the World Hour Record in Milan during the war while the city was being shattered by bombs.

“Proceed as the way opens” is how William Least Heat-Moon put it in his book, River Horse. The line becomes a sort of mantra for Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth McGowan, a melanoma survivor. Having been given a five-year clean bill of health, McGowan decides to bicycle all 4,000 or so miles from America’s West to East Coast. She wants to help other melanoma victims and sets out to use her many miles to raise funds for cancer research. She also wants to better understand her late father, who died of melanoma at the age of 44, when Elizabeth was just 15.