Reddit reviews He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back: The True Story of the Year the King, Jaws, Earnhardt, and the Rest of NASCAR's Feudin', Fightin' Good Ol' Boys Put Stock Car Racing on the Map

• Real NASCAR By Daniel S. Pierce - My go-to NASCAR history book; he covers a lot of the sport's business dealings and gets further into some more recent eras (late 80's/early 90s) than some other "History of NASCAR" books.
  
  
• Driving With the Devil by Neil Thompson - The top of my hypothetical NASCAR 101 reading list. If you want the literal dirt on the sport's formation and NASCAR's organization, this book covers it. Thompson takes care to feature a lot of the big stock car racing players outside of the France family, which is incredibly eye-opening.
  
  
• He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back by Mark Bechtel - With the best title out of any NASCAR book, this one just gets deep into the 1979 season, which only got crazier after the groundbreaking national broadcast of the '79 500.
  
  
• NASCAR Generations by Robert Edelstein - Has a lot of firsthand accounts on almost all the famous NASCAR families.

There is a very good narrative history of the race and the events preceding it.