Edward (Ed) Hotaling

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With each of Ed Hotaling's books, you discover major missing chapters in history. The first is a richly detailed romp through the story of our first national resort, starting with a visit by the tipsy Founder of Our Country. "George Washington schlepped here," the author notes as he launches this often hilarious history of Americans on vacation. The New York Times found They're Off! Horse Racing at Saratoga "deliciously readable." Ranging far beyond horse racing, this quintessentially American story takes you - or, if you've been there before, takes you happily back - to one of our country's most spectacular small towns without leaving your living room.

In his early twenties, Hotaling settled on the edge of the Persian desert outside Tehran, writing for an Iranian publisher and traveling throughout Iran.

Then, in France, he joined the storied Paris Trib, and the Left Bank community of writers and artists. After several years in Paris, Hotaling hit the road again, moving first to Greece, teaching, writing and scoring a world scoop on the Greek coup as he reported from Athens in French for Radio Luxembourg. He then slipped into Israel as a reporter during the Six-Day War, following the fighting into Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Syria’s Golan Heights.

Next came interludes in Manhattan--as a Village Voice writer and a CBS producer at the U.S. Presidential nominating conventions--and in Los Angeles as a critic for Art News.

Hotaling then returned to the Middle East, reporting on the 2,000th birthday of the Persian Empire and the war on Cyprus, both for CBS News. As the CBS Bureau Chief for the region, he also covered the Arab-Israeli war and the Lebanese Civil War. Next, as Bureau Chief for McGraw-Hill World News, based in the Persian Gulf, he reported on the explosive business developments among the oil powers.

Hotaling’s combat-reporting experiences and expertise on Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism produced two more books, one uncovering the secret workings of the Arab Boycott and another introducing Americans to Islam. Islam Without Illusions: Its Past, Its Present, and Its Challenge for Our Future is the first book by a major American journalist on Islam as a whole. It has been featured on several television broadcasts, including CNN's "Wolf Blitzer Reports."

With his wife Marthe Vincent Hotaling and their two sons, Hotaling moved to Washington, where as a television journalist he concentrated on both international developments and American history and politics. He conducted the famous interview on African-Americans in sports with Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder and drew world-wide attention with his discovery that those symbols of freedom, the U.S. Capitol and the White House, were built with slave labor. Hotaling collected six Washington Emmy awards.

Edward Hotaling also authored The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America's First National Sport (Random House), the only book on those forgotten athletes, the earliest of them slaves. Charles Osgood of CBS News Sunday Morning says "this may be the most fascinating untold story in American history."

Ed Hotaling next wrote Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield (McGraw-Hill), the American jockey whose breathtaking adventures took place amid World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Paris of the Twenties, and the Nazi invasion of France (even of "Wink’s" own stables)- and ended with a confrontation in America in which Wink emerged victorious yet again. Wink has been featured widely on television and radio, including the CBS Evening News, CNN, and NPR. The Harvey Klinger Agency in New York represents Wink.