The ultimate speed-read
Turbo-charged look at the heated race-car rivalry between Ferrari and Ford.
In this cultural history, character study and page-turning action-adventure story, Playboy executive editor Baime (Big Shots: The Men Behind the Booze, 2003) focuses on France’s 24-hour Le Mans race in the mid-1960s—which doubled as an advertising showcase for Ford and Ferrari to sell cars. This was the international playground where self-promotional genius Enzo Ferrari and the impossibly wealthy, ambitious Henry Ford II could most visibly conduct their battle for supremacy. The two biggest automotive chess masters of the day squared off in something akin to a 20th-century version of The Knight’s Tale, where race-car drivers were little more than expendable pawns in their quest for wealth and global domination. Baime covers the golden-era years from 1964 to 1966, when a culture of youth and speed ruled and car racing was still considered a gentleman’s sport. In the author’s capable hands, the controversial 1966 Le Mans race makes for the ideal climactic centerpiece. The furious narrative pace never lets up, with facile but effective tension-building transitions between each chapter. Baime also provides ample historical and biographical context for nearly everyone involved—not just the big shots Ford and Ferrari, but also the steel-nerved drivers and invaluable pit crews. These included Ferrari’s seemingly indestructible champion John Surtees, the perennial underdog driver Phil Hill and Ford’s mechanical mastermind Carroll Shelby. Baime’s rich descriptions of the cars—including the muscular Shelby Cobra and the curvy, sexy Ferrari—lift them to near-human proportions.
The ultimate speed-readPub Date: June 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-618-82219-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
How Book Adaptations Fared at Golden Globe Noms
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The fifth annual offering in this series edited by Stout features stories selected by Jenkins (You Gotta Play Hurt, 1991, etc.), this year's editor, and as usual, the results are mostly impressive. Looking back with the talented writers whose work festoons this volume, one quickly is reminded that 1994 was a dismal year for sports: the major-league baseball strike, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Jennifer Capriati's brush with the law and drug rehab, O.J. Simpson's arrest. Not surprisingly, the generally ugly tone of the year in sports is reflected in a volume dominated by these unpleasant topics. Jenkins mercifully only includes one piece on the O.J. trial, a brutal concoction by James Ellroy that is as savage and bleak in tone as any of that estimable neo-noir author's novels. It was a bad year for humor, judging from the contents of this collection, which is bookended by two excruciatingly unfunny pieces by Bob Verdi (on the baseball strike) and Ian Thomsen (on TonyaGate). The highs and lows of the collection are amply demonstrated in the book's foreword and introduction, respectively, a heartfelt tribute to a little-known black writer by Stout and a sour, mean-spirited diatribe against intellectuals who write on sports by Jenkins. Once you are past Jenkins, however, there is a multiplicity of rewards here. Particularly worthy are Dave Kindred's visit with Ted Williams, shortly after the great hitter's stroke; Gary Smith's superb reporting on a gathering of most of the world's living record-holders in the mile; and Gary Cartwright's recollection of a vanished high school football legend from his hometown. This book proves once again that although sports may be falling apart under the relentless pressure of corporate meddling, greed, drugs, racism, and the rest of the real world, sportswriters are still reporting that downfall with keen intelligence and art.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-70070-1
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The awesome vision of a woman tearing herself down to the bone and then slowly, painstakingly, recreating herself in her own image. Pushcart Prize winner Legler (Creative Writing/Univ. of Alaska) is violently angry at herself and her surroundings. Even as she fishes and hunts with her gentle, loving husband, she feels defensive, insecure, and alone. Legler reveals bits of what disturbs her—the dawning awareness of her precarious place among sportsmen, the inability to penetrate her father's unloving exterior, her sister's suicide—but it is not until nearly halfway through the book that we learn Legler's looming secret: her lesbianism. Suddenly, the fragments of her personality converge—for us. For Legler, the process is more gradual and painful. She decides to leave her husband; she begins to date women. Her family is neither unkind nor understanding. In the end, Legler is still not completely happy with herself, but she has found some measure of peace and strong, lasting friendships. Through it all, the author hunts and fishes. But like her sexuality, these activities are tinged with ambivalence. She tries to explain how a seemingly cruel act can be transformed through respect and gratitude. Legler hits upon a provoking idea, comparing her hunting with eroticism and the dismembered meat in the supermarket with pornography. ``Nearly everything we cooked for our feasts was from our garden, or collected from the woods, or killed by us. . . . I want this kind of intimate relationship with the food I eat.'' Birds in the supermarket, on the other hand, were ``grotesque combinations of named parts. It always felt obscene to me.'' Although these essays are ostensibly distinct, together they create a sense of process that makes this book exceptional. Legler's epiphanies are book-length—and longer. What this volume evokes is beyond sympathy; the reader aches for Legler's pain.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-878067-70-2
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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