Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler's Best

Winner of the Motor Press Guild Best Book of the Year Award Winner of the Motor Press Guild Dean Batchelor Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism "The story of the speed revolution is long and complicated, but many of its parts are amenable to heroic narration . . . money is spent and lives are lost . . . champions rise and barriers fall . . . Grandeur and grandiosity abound. It makes for the kind of history movie producers love. Neal Bascomb's new book, Faster . . . is this kind of history . . . Like many of the cars that race through it, Faster . . . keeps a brisk pace . . . Fresh, and told in vivid detail . . . [Bascomb] describes the twists and turns of the 1930s Grand Prix races as if he'd driven the courses himself." —New York Times Book Review "[A] well-researched account of the 1938 Grand Prix in Pau, France . . . Excellent . . . [Bascomb] moves with the aplomb of an F1 driver who starts in the middle of the pack and works his way up, car by car, to take the lead . . . Exciting, fast-moving prose." —Wall Street Journal "Bascomb's account of the improbable victory of René Dreyfus over Nazi Germany's elite racing team has speed, depth, and poetry. Race cars . . . Nazis . . . Monaco . . . a brash heiress and taciturn underdog...an epic showdown in the Pyrénées. It's hard not to fall in love with Faster, Neal Bascomb's brisk new portrait of European auto racing on the eve of World War II . . . The season's most exhilarating and substantive beach read . . . It's precision-engineered for Hollywood . . . There is alchemy at work in a piece of writing that approximates the rhythms of racing. At pivotal moments, the sentences fire in escalating, compact bursts—each stalking the next like the cars crowding each other on the winding city-streets of an old-style Grand Prix . . . Bascomb's two great strengths as a nonfiction writer are his ability to create immersive scenes and his adherence to Hemingway's 'show, don't tell' principle . . . Readers will certainly come away with an appreciation for Bascomb's deft portraits of these dynamic personalities, and for his miraculous excavation of an entirely new story from the over-tilled soils of World War II nonfiction." —National Review "The 1938 Pau Grand Prix has all the trappings of a blockbuster Hollywood film: cars, chaos, colorful characters, a competition between good and evil—in this case France and Nazi Germany. But until Neal Bascomb . . . decided to make the race the focus of his latest book, the tale remained little-known. Now, the story . . . has come roaring to life in truly cinematic fashion." —Smithsonian "The cars had tyres with little grip, feeble brakes and no crash protection whatever. Hot oil would continuously spray over drivers, who raced in linen caps . . . excursions would often result in mutilation or immolation. Faster is the story of René Dreyfus, who flourished in this atrocious atmosphere . . . Bascomb writes with a confidence and elegance based on impressive research and experience in the field of adventures . . . There is not much glory in our world. But you will find it in Faster." —The Spectator "Bascomb has re-created Europe's motorsport subculture of the 1930s, a mix of glamour, bitter rivalries and mortal danger, against the darkening clouds of fascism. A fine stylist, the author has sketched an ensemble of intriguing characters . . . he has mastered the language of propulsion and velocity . . . [Faster is] worth —