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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Motor Press Guild Best Book of the Year Award & Dean Batchelor Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism
For fans of The Boys in the Boat and In the Garden of Beasts, a pulse-pounding tale of triumph by an improbable team of upstarts over Hitler's fearsome Silver Arrows during the golden age of auto racing.
They were the unlikeliest of heroes. Rene Dreyfus, a former top driver on the international racecar circuit, had been banned from the best European teams--and fastest cars--by the mid-1930s because of his Jewish heritage. Charles Weiffenbach, head of the down-on-its-luck automaker Delahaye, was desperately trying to save his company as the world teetered toward the brink. And Lucy Schell, the adventurous daughter of an American multi-millionaire, yearned to reclaim the glory of her rally-driving days.
As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, these three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler's dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix. Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day--but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.
Bringing to life this glamorous era and the sport that defined it, Faster chronicles one of the most inspiring, death-defying upsets of all time: a symbolic blow against the Nazis during history's darkest hour.
Author Notes
NEAL BASCOMB is the award-winning and New York Times best-selling author of The Winter Fortress, Hunting Eichmann, The Perfect Mile, among others.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Historian Bascomb (The Escape Artists) dramatizes the Golden Era of Grand Prix racing and the showdown between French-Jewish driver René Dreyfus and German champion Rudi Caracciola at the 1938 Pau Grand Prix in this exuberant chronicle. Bascomb sketches the early history of motor racing, including the 1903 Paris to Madrid race that killed more than a dozen people, and charts the precipitous rise of German drivers and their Mercedes-Benz "Silver Arrows" after car enthusiast Adolf Hitler (who kept a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford behind his desk) came to power. As the narrative around Grand Prix racing shifted from driver vs. driver to nation vs. nation, England, France, and Italy fell behind Germany. American heiress and race car driver Lucy Schell helped to change that dynamic, however, by funding French automaker Delahaye's efforts to build a car fast enough to compete with Hitler's "mechanized army" of drivers. With Dreyfus--whose Jewish heritage excluded him from the sport's best teams--behind the wheel, the Delahaye 145 went head-to-head with Mercedes-Benz on a treacherous racetrack in the French village of Pau and won. Bascomb packs the book with colorful details and expertly captures the thrill and terror of early-20th-century auto racing. This rousing popular history fires on all cylinders. (Mar.)
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue "We Will Write the History Now" THE BEAST, LONG lurking in plain sight while the Allies stood idle, pounced at last. On May 10, 1940, wave after wave of German bombers, their supercharged engines in high pitch, swept across the dawn sky while armored columns rumbled overland. Into Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg the Nazis advanced, shattering the morning quiet. Their paratroopers severed communication lines and captured essential bridges. Commandos dropped from glider planes and seized critical fortresses before they could stall any advance. In short order, panzer divisions barreled deep into foreign territory. When French and British forces hurried northeastward to Belgium to stem the attack, they fell straight into the trap of expectations entrenched from the First World War. To their east, the main thrust of the German juggernaut charged through the seventy-mile stretch of the Ardennes, forested hills once considered as impenetrable as the concrete fortifications of the Maginot Line that ran along the border between France and Germany. The French had some fight left in them, but it was at best panicked going up against what one witness called "a cruel machine in perfect condition, organized, disciplined, all-powerful." At the news and battered suitcases, holding twisted birdcages, and dogs in stiff arms," observed Life magazine, "they came and came and came." Fearing an invasion for more than a year, the French had safeguarded many of their finest treasures. In Paris, monuments were sandbagged, and the stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle had been removed. Curators at the Louvre denuded its walls of masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa and its floors of priceless sculptures. Convoys of nondescript trucks hauled these artworks to chateaus across the country. Likewise, French physicists evacuated their supplies of heavy water and uranium, instrumental to the pursuit of a nuclear bomb. Priceless art and rare substances were not the only items squirreled away as the German blitzkrieg threatened Paris. Across the city, people stashed family heirlooms in cellars and buried them wrapped in oilcloth. One Parisian hid a batch of diamonds in a jar of congealed lard that he left on his pantry shelf. In the Delahaye factory on the rue du Banquier in the working-class heart of the city stood four 145s. The manufacturer's production chief intended to see his creations secured away, whether by dismantling them into parts, hiding them in caves outside the city, or, like those diamonds in the lard, masking them in the open, their engines and chassis covered up with new bodies--or none at all--and their true provenance concealed. These masterpieces could not be lost in the rage of war, nor found by the Nazis. There was little doubt that Hitler wanted them seized and destroyed. In late May, the Germans drove back the Allied forces into northern France, where they were forced to evacuate the continent at Dunkirk. Then the invading army wheeled toward Paris. Reynaud exhorted his countrymen to fight to the death to hold the Somme, while his feckless war committee debated where to move the government when Paris fell. His staff collected secret papers to be sunk in barges in the Seine or burned in ministry yards. While the police Stuka planes dropped over a thousand bombs, targeting most intensely the Renault and Citroën factories in western Paris, which had transitioned to war production, much as their German counterparts, most notably Daimler-Benz and Auto Union, had done years before. The attack killed 254 and wounded triple that number. The exodus from Paris accelerated. Two days later, the Germans launched the second half of their campaign to take France. At the Somme, they ruptured the French line, their panzer divisions overpowering the courageous but doomed army. The door to Paris was ajar, and Reynaud and his government abandoned the capital. Onward the Wehrmacht pressed. In the capital, the growing numbers of routed French soldiers with unkempt beards and muddied uniforms portended the inevitable. Finally, on June 14, motorized columns of the German army--including heavy trucks, armored vehicles, motorcycles with sidecars, and tanks--entered an undefended city. Soldiers clad in gray and green followed on foot. The streets were so empty before them that at one intersection a herd of untethered cows aimlessly wandered past. The Germans fortified positions at key arteries across the city, but there was no reason for such caution. Residents were helpless to launch a revolt when their armies had already retreated to the south. Instead, from windows and half-open doorways, they gaped at the rows of Germans marching past in their heavy boots. By the afternoon, swastikas flew from the Arc de Triomphe and the ministry of foreign affairs. An enormous banner was strung to the Eiffel Tower that read, in block letters, "DEUTSCHLAND SIEGT AN ALLEN FRONTEN" threaded throughout the city streets, demanding obedience and warning that any hostile act against the Third Reich's troops would be punishable by execution. On June 18, General Charles de Gaulle broadcast his own message to his countrymen from his offices in exile at the BBC in London. "Is the last word said? Has all hope gone? Is the defeat definitive? No. Believe me, I tell you that nothing is lost for France. One day--victory . . . Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not die and will not die." Marshal Philippe Pétain, the newly installed French prime minister, maintained the opposite conviction. He pleaded for surrender, and on June 21, Hitler rolled into the Forest of Compiègne in an oversized Mercedes to deliver his demands. Surrounded by his highest officials, including General Walther von Brauchitsch, commander of all German forces, Hitler emerged from his car. Never one to shy from symbols, he forced the French to sign the terms of capitulation in the same train carriage in the same clearing where the Kaiser's emissaries had surrendered on November 11, 1918. Fifty miles away in Paris, the Germans solidified their control of the capital, targeted its Jewish population, and began expropriating whatever they wanted. "They knew where everything was," was the common refrain: the best hotels, the finest galleries, the richest houses, and even the most popular bordellos. On the Place de la Concorde, the German army commandeered the famously elegant Hôtel de Crillon and its neighboring colonnaded mansion, which was owned by the Automobile Club de France (the ACF). Founded in 1895, and the first such club of its kind, the club organized the French Grand Prix. Its membership included some of the wealthiest, most influential men in the city. Spread out over 100,000 square feet in a pair of buildings constructed during the reign of Louis XV, the club's quarters were well suited to its prestige. One day early in the occupation, its private bedrooms, and its shaded terraces were of no interest to him. Neither was he there to dine in one of its chandeliered, gold-trimmed restaurants, nor to swim in its palatial pool surrounded with statues like a Roman bath. Instead, the officer headed straight to the library, a cavernous, book-filled space that also held the ACF archives and records of every race held in the country since 1895. They were an invaluable and unique resource, chronicling remarkable French wins and ignoble defeats alike. "Bring me all the race files," the Nazi ordered the young ACF librarian. The voluminous records were boxed up and brought out on a cart. While his subordinates hauled them away, the Gestapo officer turned to the librarian. "Go home and never return here, or you'll be arrested. We will write the history now." The tale of René Dreyfus, his odd little Delahaye race car, and their champion Lucy Schell was one of the stories that Hitler would have liked struck from the books. This is its telling. Excerpted from Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler's Best by Neal Bascomb All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Author's Note | p. xi |
Prologue | p. xix |
Part I | |
1 The Look | p. 3 |
2 The Rainmaster | p. 24 |
3 The Speed Queen and Old Gaulish Warrior | p. 42 |
Part II | |
4 Crash | p. 63 |
5 The One Thing | p. 84 |
6 The Shadow | p. 104 |
7 A Very Good Story | p. 125 |
Part III | |
8 Rally | p. 147 |
9 The Winged Beetle | p. 160 |
10 "Le Draine du Million" | p. 173 |
11 The Duel | p. 186 |
12 "One of Us Will Die" | p. 202 |
13 "Find Something" | p. 218 |
14 The Dress Rehearsal | p. 229 |
15 Victory at Pau | p. 241 |
Epilogue | p. 259 |
Acknowledgments | p. 275 |
Notes | p. 279 |
Sources and Bibliography | p. 321 |
Index | p. 330 |