Will o'the Glen on Books

Faster , by Neal Bascomb, combines narratives on early auto racing and early-20th century European political history into a fascinating and obviously well-researched book about French Grand Prix race driver René Dreyfus, wealthy American race driver and team owner Lucy O'Reilly Schell, and the estimable Delahaye 145 race car with which they triumphed over the formidable W-145 Silver Arrows of the Nazi-government-backed Mercedes-Benz at the season-opening Pau Grand Prix in 1938. After opening with the author's description of being taken for a ride in one of the still-existing Delahay 145s by its wealthy auto-enthusiast owner in March 2019, the book dives into the past. It is a fascinating story, recounting both Dreyfus and Schell’s backgrounds and life in motor racing, with plenty of detail about the other important figures in the story, including German race-car driver Rudi Caracciaola, a star of the Third Reich's propaganda-driven backing of German motor racing. Backed...

The latest effort from the pen of the author of Ice Harvest is a quirky, enjoyable, and puzzling SoCal-noir thriller that will, at the very least, challenge your expectations of the genre. For quirky and puzzling, let’s start with the title, which will be instantly recognized by fans of the Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1950s and ’60s (the line was most famously uttered by Bugs in the 1953 Warner Brothers cartoon Bully for Bugs ); but for reasons I cannot fathom, there is no reference to the line in the book, nor to Albuquerque, or even (at a stretch) to Bugs Bunny. For enjoyable one need look no further than Phillips’ prose, and his characters. His observations and dialogue are spot-on, and the characters that inhabit the story are well-realized and original – and therein lies one of the challenges of the story. His protagonist, a lawyer named Douglas Rigby, is pretty hard to like. A philanderer and an embezzler, Rigby is on the brink of financial insolvency and is not...

In the opening decades of the 20th century two basic methods of powered flight—lighter-than-air craft, commonly known as air ships, and heavier-than-air craft, or airplanes—were the technologies competing for the role of prime movers for the air transportation of goods and passengers. Alexander Rose’s new book, Empires of the Sky, to be published on 28 April, 2020, tells the story of this technological duel by examining the rivalry between the main protagonists in the field—the Zeppelin Company of Germany, headed by Hugo Eckener, and Pan American Airways, helmed by the relentless (and ruthless) Juan Terry Trippe. In retrospect, it may seem that heavier-than-air craft—airplanes—were a shoo-in for the job over their lighter-than-air rivals, but in the early years of the 20th century this was not a foregone conclusion. Just as a boat floats because it weighs less than the volume of water it displaces, dirigibles get their lift by using a lighter gas (either hydrogen, in the case of the...