Against Death and Time : One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years

Rating:
Summary: How Do You Want to Die?
Review: 3.5 stars. This is a multifaceted, interesting read that succeeds at its key goals while falling short of greatness. The author, a respected automotive journalist, does an excellent job at creating cameos of numerous drivers who risked their lives to drive. Many died in 1955, one of racing's most lethal years.

The book describes the historical context of some of the social forces in 1950s America as well as the growth of (mostly) American auto racing and its significance to American culture and the auto industry. For readers who are not familiar with drivers and the history of the Indianapolis 500, the roots of NASCAR and the national dirt track races, this book will pique their interest in learning more. It contrasts the world of "professional" American drivers, The Indy 500 and the dirt tracks, with the comparatively genteel world of sports car drivers in the U.S. and Europe. Professional drivers had working class backgrounds and were daredevils that had returned from World War II, while sports car drivers were wealthy and drove for amusement rather than purses. However, they had in common that they died behind the wheel.

It is obvious that Yates knows his subject well and is mesmerized by the drivers' unabashed willingness to risk their lives to drive. The cars and safety precautions were so primitive that drivers died in most races described. Poetically, Yates points out that the crashed cars were rebuilt and put back on the track, often within days. The race goes on. He asserts that, seen from today's standpoint, the drivers appear to be mad due to the risks they take.

I was hooked by the Wall Street Journal review that quoted a philosophical snippet in which a journalist was interviewing a renowned Italian driver. He asked how the driver could take such risks behind the wheel. The driver shot back, "How do you want to die?" He was grounded in the recognition that death awaits us all and that he felt lucky to choose how he wanted to die. Several drivers described that they lived when they drove. Their attitude seemed to be that death was a small price for living.

Unfortunately, Yates cannot quite get comfortable with this, and his point of view remains that of a horrified, fascinated onlooker. The fact that we are all racing against death and time is an element that he does not contemplate, one that would have put the book in classic territory. We can only decide what kind of race we want to run. The drivers he described all knew the risks, and many stated flat out that they expected to die young. Similarly, racing spectators knew the risks of watching at close quarters, as they vicariously sat poised behind the wheels of their favorite drivers. Yates struggles to describe and understand this mystery, but he cannot seem to accept it.

Although I do not have first-hand knowledge of the publishing process, I infer that this book suffers from poor editing. The author was not guided in balancing and maintaining the continuity of several threads in the book: the cameos of the drivers, the historical reportage of the period and the personal experience of the fictitious journalist who interviews the drivers in the book. The later chapters read more like a novel that takes place in France and Italy, and the reporter's personal exploits eclipse the experience of the drivers and races. His account of bedding the daughter of a Hollywood mogul detract from the book's focus without adding much value. The last major thread was the persona of James Dean and his rise to stardom and subsequent fatal crash in late 1955. The idea of using Dean to personify "devil may care" risk taking was an excellent attempt at intertextuality with Rebel Without a Cause, but the flow was compromised by being uneven, disjointed and not fully developed. The last chapter is an attempt to pull everything together in a conclusion, but it fails to investigate the white elephant in the room, the philosophical element. Finally, the proofreading was exceptionally poor, with constant misspellings of English, French and Italian words.

In conclusion, this is an ambitious book that succeeds as a fascinating depiction of the lives of drivers, racing and 1950s America. Yates' strengths as a reporter are obvious, but he is clearly not a novelist. If the book had addressed the philosophical element of the subject and editing had helped to integrate and balance the other threads better, it could have easily been 5+ stars.

Rating:
Summary: My imagaination is racing!
Review: I knew nothing about auto racing & I've never been to a race. I recently bought a ticket to the Indy 500 & saw this book displayed in a book store in Avon IN, west of Indianapolis. As background & to prepare for my first race experience, I read this book. It is absolutley superb. An informative, history based, page turning, imaginative narrative. If you are a racing enthusiast I believe you will not be able to put the book down! It's a winner!

Rating:
Summary: My imagaination is racing!
Review: I knew nothing about auto racing & I've never been to a race. I recently bought a ticket to the Indy 500 & saw this book displayed in a book store in Avon IN, west of Indianapolis. As background & to prepare for my first race experience, I read this book. It is absolutley superb. An informative, history based, page turning, imaginative narrative. If you are a racing enthusiast I believe you will not be able to put the book down! It's a winner!

Rating:
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: I was truly looking forward to this book but what a disappointment! Brock Yates has become a parody of himself. His dialog shifts back and forth from hacknyed fifties slang to current hip phrases like "hooking up". Well known nicknames (such as Eddie Kuzma aka Eddie Kazoom, not Zazoom) are butchered. Yates politics and opinions are freely interchangable as facts. Altogether this "Faction" (his term) is just poor fiction. All of Burt Levy's "The Last Open Road" series are far more illuminating and much more fun.

Rating:
Summary: Yates should stick to fact, not "faction"
Review: This is an annoying book, ill-conceived and sloppily written, and I say that as a person who's subscribed to Car and Driver since junior high (25 years) and has grown up reading, and respecting, Yates. At the top of his game nobody better captures the special lure of auto racing, the mixture of pure speed with the always present possibility of violent death or injury, and you'd think the troubled 1955 racing season would be a natural subject for such a writer. But in this book the method gets in the way of the story, for Yates tells his tale through a fictional younger self who attends the races and witnesses the events, mingles with the participants, and comments on the passing social and political scene, all in about as ham-handed a way as possible. As a result, such luminaries of mid-50's racing as Bill Vukovich, Briggs Cunningham, John Fitch, Phil Walters, and Phil Hill become plot devices, characters who enter a scene as if in a bad detective story, utter enough lines to advance the plot, then leave. Either Yates has no skill at crafting dialogue, and there are several passages in here that leave one groaning, or these people never had anything interesting to say about a pursuit to which they devoted years of their lives. Surely the author has run across some of these folks in the course of his career (Hill and Fitch have frequently appeared at vintage events and concours) and they've told better stories than these. It makes me wonder what kind of book this would have been if Yates had simply written a straightforward history, where he could impart the information, and the commentary, without being trapped in his plot device.

Another Amazon reviewer has commented about the philosophical failings of this book, wherein many more questions are raised than answered, despite the addition of a too-obviously tacked on coda. Since Yates is a sportswriter at heart, I won't hold him to answer every question he raises, but the many typographical errors and misspellings (Among other personages, we are treated to GM designer Harley J. Earle and British auto racing writer Dennis Jenkinson, geez, how can you be an auto racing writer and misspell Jenks's name) are inexcusable and give the impression of a hastily-written work.

Mine was a library copy, and I'd suggest you do the same. If you want to read Yates when he could still be bothered to care deeply about what he wrote, get a copy of Sunday Driver, recently reprinted. If you are interested in reading fact-based fiction about motor racing at mid-century in this country, Burt Levy's "The Last Open Road" series (the third book, The Fabulous Trashwagon, covers many of the same events depicted here) is head and shoulders above this effort.