ALL BUT MY LIFE

Stirling Moss lives on the boiling edge of the present--or, until recently, lived to be sitting on that edge. The world's most famous racing-driver, Moss went off the track last year at 120 mph. This year, after recovering, he went back to the same track, tried himself out on it, decided his reflexes were a shade slow and that it was time to retire. He is 33. He dictated most of the contents of this book onto tape during a dialogue with Ken Purdy. The result is not biography but an anatomy of a racing-driver, his personal discipline. It is fascinating, often subtle and full of rapid insights. A racing-driver reacts instinctively, is welded to his machine and has a canny sense of a car's weight, tire adhesion, ""drift"" on turns, etc. Moss himself is a fast driver, or flat-out, who feels he must drive ""right on the ragged edge, at ten-tenths"" of his and his machine's capabilities. (At 250 mph, he once set five records.) Much of this book simply pins down the varieties of that instinct. On courage, Moss says it is of little value, at least to him: he ""blanks out"" whatever might frighten him and concentrates on his work. On death, Moss has more comments than Hemingway on toreros, and many are classics of romanticism. Very fine.