Archive for Items Categorized 'Biography/ Autobiography', only excerpts shown, click title for full entry.

Flight of Passage

by Rinker Buck

Imagine trying to write a memoir about the defining event of your life thirty years after it happened. This was the challenge facing Buck here. In 1966, Rinker, then 15 years old, and his older brother Kern, who was 17, flew a 85-hp Piper Cub to become the youngest aviators ever to fly from coast to coast.

Mickey Thompson: The Last Racing Maniac

by Scribbler Joe (Scalzo)

I read this book with the absolute wish that every single solitary, bar none, motherlover listed in it could be looking over my shoulder reading right along with me; or even better still be listening to the author frantically reading the book aloud to all of us huddled in some musty Babbitville coffee enclave at 4:30 on a cold, rainy Wednesday afternoon.

Jochen Rindt: Uncrowned King

by David Tremayne

“Who the hell is Jochen Rindt?” is the title of the first chapter—because it was the first question people asked when Rindt seemingly came out of nowhere in 1964 to beat the big-name drivers of his day. And it is, the author fears, the first question a new generation of racing enthusiasts asks today.

Spreading My Wings

One of Britain’s Top Women Pilots Tells Her Remarkable Story from Pre-War Flying to Breaking the Sound Barrier

by Diana Barnato Walker

That subtitle tells you all you need to know. She flew 80 different types and delivered more than 260 Spitfires to the front lines. Her father was Bentley Boy Woolf Barnato, her partner in life Whitney Straight. Run, don’t walk and get a copy.

CTX 500, Last Train to Cockfosters

by David Brodie

The cover of this memoir looks harmless enough. If the author’s name means anything to you, you know it won’t be.

All Rise

My Life and Trials with the Famous, the Infamous, and the Misunderstood

by James H. Voyles Jr. with Mark Bourcier

A legal memoir? Is there an automotive connection? Yes. Kind of. But not prima facie if you want to get all legal about it.