Car_and_Driver_USA_July_2017

Reading about Reading
A LEAD­
FOOT’S
LIBRARY
SIXTEEN BOOKS EVEN MORE
ENLIGHTENING THAN THE
MAGAZINE YOU’RE HOLDING.
by Peter Manso
AND ONE MORE
We’ve previously
profiled
occasional
C/D contributor
P.J. O’Rourke’s
Driving Like
Crazy: 30 Years of
Vehicular Hellbending,
but that
doesn’t mean you
don’t still need it.
A LIST OF “BESTS” IS
ALWAYS TEMPORARY,
but these books will add weight
to anyone’s corpus of knowledge for cars,
racing, and race drivers. Our list includes
recent titles as well as some oldies that
deserve reacquaintance. And nobody’s
automotive library is complete without
Sir Stirling Moss’s All but My Life: Face to
Face with Ken Purdy, Purdy’s The Kings of
the Road, Denis Jenkinson’s The Racing
Driver: The Theory and Practice of Fast
Driving, and The Reckoning by the late
David Halberstam on the parallels of the
American and Japanese car industries.
Total Competition:
Lessons
in Strategy from
Formula One
Ross Brawn and
Adam Parr; Simon
& Schuster
A valuable peek
behind the veil at the
politics of Formula 1
and the sport’s
economics over the past 20 years. Includes
portraits of Bernie Ecclestone, Michael
Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton, designer
Adrian Newey, and the Jaguar, Ferrari,
Honda, and Benetton teams where Brawn
held sway as technical director and team
principal. The account is marred
by the tendency of the authors to
fall back on simple self-help mantras
and overly weighty references
to classical texts such as Carl von
Clausewitz’s On War and Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War. Still, a winner.
Corvette: America’s
Star-Spangled Sports
Car, the Complete
History
Karl Ludvigsen; Bentley
Publishers
The best book on Corvettes:
comprehensive, informative,
easy to read, and not
overly technical. It’s no
surprise, as Ludvigsen’s
Excellence Was Expected
remains the canonical
work on Porsche.
KLEMANTASKI:
MASTER MOTORSPORTS
PHOTOGRAPHER
Paul Parker, photography
by Louis Klemantaski;
Motorbooks
Hands down, the most
evocative photos of cars
at speed—of the phenomenon
of speed
itself—ever produced. It
should be remembered
that Klemantaski,
old-fashioned Leica in hand, worked at a time when
track photographers had such close access they could
get within feet of cars sliding by at barrier-less venues
like the Nürburgring and Spa-Francorchamps.
Photography as high art, even by Avedon or
Cartier-Bresson standards.
GOING FASTER!
MASTERING THE
ART OF RACE
DRIVING
Carl Lopez; Bentley
Publishers
The go-to manual
by the Skip Barber
School’s emeritus
instructor, a man
who knows how
to drive and how
to teach.
026 . C A R A N D D R I V E R . J U L / 2 0 1 7
photography by C J B E N N I N G E R