<P>In Black Maestro, Joe Drape meticulously brings to life the drama, adventures, romances, and heartbreaks of an unlikely participant in the greatest historical events of the twentieth century. It is a breathtaking narrative that takes you from pastoral Kentucky to Mob&ndash;controlled Chicago, from the horse country of Poland to the chaos of Red Square, and from freewheeling Paris to the hard&ndash;luck American South of the Depression. It is also a story that returns Jimmy Winkfield to his rightful place as an original American hero.</P><P> In 1919, at the age of thirty&ndash;seven, as Bolshevik cannon fire thundered above, the already epic life of Jimmy Winkfield turned into an odyssey. With a ragtag band of Russian nobility and Polish soldiers, the son of a black sharecropper from Chilesburg, Kentucky, was entrusted with saving more than 250 of the most royal but fragile thoroughbreds left in crumbling Csarist Russia. They trekked 1,100 miles from Odessa to Warsaw for nearly three months amid the bloodiest part of the Russian Revolution, surviving gunfire and starvation....</P>