Each week we assemble a collection – a bouquet, if you will – of books you can read for yourself, or use to build into a display in your library. As always, the books we link to have info from Amazon.com. If you click a link and then buy anything at all from Amazon, we get a small percent of their profits from your sale. Thanks!! We really appreciate the assistance!
Each week we look at a different collection of books, and it’s part of the fun to read books in areas you aren’t familiar. For me, that’s cars.
I know almost nothing about cars. I like road trips, but not just driving around town (I’m a walker). I don’t know how they work, what makes them break, or what kinds of things you should look for in a car. (Cheap, reliable – that’s about it for me.)
But I like my brother a lot. And my brother likes cars. He likes to talk about cars, to watch car racing, and to admire cars. His employer sponsors a NASCAR car – and the NASCAR season is wrapping up in Phoenix this Sunday! (I do like NASCAR – I like racing of any sort.)
And, we say this in our podcast fairly often: despite some stereotypes, there are no “male” or “female” books. I may not have much knowledge here, but of course nobody can be interested in everything; so if you like car books – or want to explore them with me – that’s absolutely good.
So, let’s look at cars this week! There is a lot of interesting material to read about, and a lot of possibilities for you to take this topic and set up some cool displays in your library.
- Car Fever: Dispatches from behind the Wheel, by James May
Top Gear‘s James May is back with his hilarious and controversial opinions on . . . just about everything.
As well as writing about his first love, cars, James has a go at political correctness, the endless rules and regulations of daily life, the internal combustion engine and traffic wardens. He discusses gastropubs, Jeremy Clarkson and other trials of modern life.
His highly entertaining observations from behind the wheel will have you laughing out loud, whether you share his opinions, or not.
Car Fever is an indispensable guide to life for the modern driver.
- In the Seat of a Stranger’s Car, by Beau Flemister
Who do you trust your “baby” with?In the Seat of a Stranger’s Car is a vibrant comedy that looks under the hood at the entourage of working-class misfits you leave your car with every day. Set in the bubbling ethnic melting pot of Hawai’i, by day, the pseudo-intellectual protagonist is a struggling writer who teaches at a renowned prep school. By night, he is a full-time valet, surrounded by a lewd yet lovable cast of coworkers who challenge his misplaced sense of entitlement.
The gang’s service industry stasis is quickly shattered when they discover a young boy in the trunk of a deserted vehicle in the hotel parking lot. Afraid of surrendering the abandoned child to foster care, the valets decide to raise the child as their own–a task that proves both absurd and transformative.
Juggling jobs and a budding romance with a late-night flowergirl, the narrator finds himself on a journey around the island to uncover the boy’s mysterious past but unearths something much more meaningful in the process: himself.
- How to Build a Car, by Adrian Newey
The world’s foremost designer in Formula One, Adrian Newey OBE is arguably one of Britain’s greatest engineers and this is his fascinating, powerful memoir.
How to Build a Car explores the story of Adrian’s unrivalled 35-year career in Formula One through the prism of the cars he has designed, the drivers he has worked alongside and the races in which he’s been involved.
A true engineering genius, even in adolescence Adrian’s thoughts naturally emerged in shape and form – he began sketching his own car designs at the age of 12 and took a welding course in his school summer holidays. From his early career in IndyCar racing and on to his unparalleled success in Formula One, we learn in comprehensive, engaging and highly entertaining detail how a car actually works. Adrian has designed for the likes of Mario Andretti, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill, David Coulthard, Mika Hakkinen, Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel, always with a shark-like purity of purpose: to make the car go faster. And while his career has been marked by unbelievable triumphs, there have also been deep tragedies: most notably Ayrton Senna’s death during his time at Williams in 1994.
How to Build a Car encapsulates, through Adrian’s remarkable life story, precisely what makes Formula One so thrilling – its potential for the total synchronicity of man and machine, the perfect combination of style, efficiency and speed.
When Bob Lutz got into the auto business in the early 1960s, CEOs knew that if you captured the public’s imagination with innovative car design and top-quality craftsmanship, the money would follow. The “car guys” held sway, and GM dominated with bold, creative leadership and iconic brands like Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, GMC, and Chevrolet.
But then GM’s leadership began to put its faith in numbers and spreadsheets. Determined to eliminate the “waste” and “personality worship” of the bygone creative leaders, management got too smart for its own good. With the bean counters firmly in charge, carmakers, and much of American industry, lost their single-minded focus on product excellence and their competitive advantage. Decline soon followed.
In 2001, General Motors hired Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. As vice chairman, he launched a war against the penny-pinching number crunchers who ran the company by the bottom line and reinstated a focus on creativity, design, and cars and trucks that would satisfy GM’s customers.
Lutz’s commonsense lessons, combined with a generous helping of fascinating anecdotes, will inspire readers in any industry.
- Cannonball, by Brock Yates
This first book of its kind tells the behind-the-scenes story of the incredibly illegal Cannonball rally. This best seller is now available in paperback!In the early 1970s, Brock Yates, senior editor of Car and Driver Magazine, created the now infamous Cannonball Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash; a flat out, no-holds-barred race from New York City to Redondo Beach, California. Setting out to prove that well trained drivers could safely navigate the American highways at speeds in excess of the posted limits, Mr. Yates created a spectacle reminiscent of the glory days of the barnstorming pilots. Filled with fascinating unpublished stories, nostalgic and modern-day photographs, inside information and hilarious stories from this outrageous and incredibly immoral rally. Brock is one of the best-known, most respected automotive journalists in the world today.
- Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed To Be — With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a … of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn, by P. J. O’Rourke
Driving Like Crazy celebrates cars and author P. J. O’Rourke’s love for them, while chronicling the golden age of the automobile in America. O’Rourke takes us on a whirlwind tour of the world’s most scenic and bumpiest roads in trouble-laden cross-country treks, from a 1978 Florida-to-California escapade in a 1956 special four-door Buick sedan to a 1983 thousand-mile effort across Mexico in the Baja 1000 to a trek through Kyrgyzstan in 2006 on the back of a Soviet army surplus six-wheel-drive truck. For longtime fans of the celebrated humorist, the collection features a host of O’Rourke’s classic pieces on driving, including “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink,” about the potential misdeeds one might perform in the front (and back) seat of an automobile; “The Rolling Organ Donors Motorcycle Club,” which chronicles a seven-hundred-mile weekend trip through Michigan and Indiana that O’Rourke took on a Harley Davidson alongside Car & Driver publisher David E. Davis, Jr.; his brilliant and funny piece from Rolling Stone on NASCAR and its peculiar culture, recorded during an alcohol-fueled weekend in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1977; and an hilarious account of a trek from Islamabad to Calcutta in Land Rover’s new Discovery Trek.
{I have read this car book, because when P.J. O’Rourke is writing well he is funny no matter what he’s talking about!}