Recommended Reading: A Holiday Motorsports Book Gift Guide

In addition to writing books, I review books others have written. So far this year, I’ve read two dozen new automotive or motorsports titles. With the holidays approaching quickly, I want to share some gift-buying ideas for the car guy or gal on your shopping list.

Clearly the best work of fiction I’ve ever read about racing is Ted West’s Closing Speed (published by Demontreville Press, Inc.).

West has accomplished something I’d long been told was impossible: He wrote a novel, a book-length story full of compelling characters, with an unfolding plot that enfolds various subplots, all set on the stage of auto racing.

Novels set on athletic fields rarely work. For one thing, it’s hard for fiction writers to create stories as dramatic as the real events that arise naturally on the playing field or race track. And yet, that’s what West achieves with Closing Speed, which is set against the backdrop of sports car racing in the 1970s, has true-to-the-track characters and a story line that has us hooked from first page to last.

For stock car racing fans, I offer two titles. One is Growing Up NASCAR: Racing’s Most Outrageous Promoter Tells All, by Humpy Wheeler and Peter Golenbock (published by Motorbooks). The other is Declarations of Stock Car Independents: Interviews with Twelve Racers of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by Perry Allen Wood (published by McFarland & Co).

With only 300 pages between the book’s covers, Howard “Humpy” Wheeler Jr. doesn’t have room to really tell all that he knows about stock car racing’s growth from the days when, after outrunning the revenuers, moonshiners raced each other around oval tracks carved out of some Southern farmer’s field to become a nationally televised sports-entertainment production with major significance when it comes to American corporate sports marketing budgets.

Wheeler ran small tracks, worked for Firestone when it was supplying tires to NASCAR teams, and then ran Charlotte Motor Speedway (aka Lowe’s). Not only does he know his subject, but as a former amateur boxer, he doesn’t pull any punches.

Neither do the dozen drivers interviewed by Perry Allen Wood for his book. Wood sought out drivers who didn’t have factory-supported teams and let them offer their perspective on the sport. Wood has done stock car racing and its fans a favor by preserving an important but overlooked piece of the sport’s history.

As Wood explains in his Preface to the book, he wanted to “tell stories of… those lightly funded field-fillers who did it the hard way… Theirs are tales of hardship and humor, despair and delight, pain and pleasure, and failure and fulfillment. Rarely were they stories of victory…

“They raced, struggled, endured, and died pursuing their dreams – and their stories need to be told.”

Last but certainly not least is The Jaundiced Eye: Forty Years of Writing, Reporting and Ranting from AutoWeek’s Publisher Emeritus Leon Mandel, edited by Kevin A. Wilson (published by 671 Press and available from www.autoweek.com).

Disclosure: I am not objective about this book. I worked for Leon Mandel for 12 years at AutoWeek and he was more than a mentor to staffers such as Kevin A. Wilson and me.

Unlike Jack Nicholson’s famous line from the movies – “You can’t handle the truth!” – Mandel contended that his readers, AutoWeek’s subscribers, were “brave enough to be told the truth. Moreover,” he wrote, “your faith is firm enough to withstand it. Even more than that, you deserve to know.”

The truth as seen through Mandel’s eyes makes for wonderful reading.

Read more from Larry Edsall at iZoom

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