The Auto Channel--Sports Car International V12 I1

BOOK REVIEWS

The Last Open Road
By B.S. Levy
Hardbound, no illlus., 540 pages, $25.00
Published by: Think Fast Ink
US distribution: 1010 Lake Street, Ste. 103
Oak Park, Illinois 60301
fax (708) 383-7206

Buddy Palumbo is a 17-year old kid when he starts hanging around Finzio's Sinclair station in Passaic, New Jersey. The year is 1952.

When ex-Marine "Butch" Bohunk, the station's mechanic, needs a hand, Buddy lends it. Eventually he even inherits Butch's job; the pay is low and most of the customers' cars are heaps, but the boss' curvaceous niece, Julie, keeps things interesting.

Next, Buddy's quest to keep "Big Ed" Baumstein's Jaguar XK120 on the road introduces him to the perpetual-maintenance machine known as the British sports car. Then he moves on to a British-car dealership in Manhattan and the acquaintance of Barry Spline, the store's slippery service manager. From there, all it takes is a trip to the races at Bridgehampton, where our grease-monkey hero gets a firsthand look at Allards, Jags, Porsches, MGs and a 4.1-liter Ferrari in action, to give him the racing bug.

As the plot winds on, The Last Open Road becomes downright peppered with realistic scenery and icons of the '50s-era amateur sports-car scene. Not unpredictably, Buddy's obsession soon lands him in trouble with Old Man Finzio, the Sinclair station's sportscar-hating owner, and Buddy ends up fired. Julie also resents taking a backseat to racecars.

Buddy hires on at the dealership in Manhattan, but then a close pal is involved in a racing accident in which a young spectator is killed. This look at the dark side of racing makes Buddy re-evaluate his relationship with the sport. Finally he and Julie make up, and in time he proposes to her while they both lie in a coffin at his MG-racer/undertaker pal's funeral parlor.

BS Levy is attempting to convey the atmosphere of a small New Jersey town during the Korean War and the feeling of sports-car racing at that time, and to a degree he succeeds. Readers who remember that era - or have even studied it from afar - will certainly enjoy the racing scenes, and they'll easily identify in Levy's characters the real people who populated that world. Younger enthusiasts will also be surprised at how accessible racing was then - it was a time when you could pick a car up at a dealer's on Friday night and race it Saturday morning. As a historical study, then, The Last Open Road works well.

But while Levy's style reflects the influence of Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, his constant use of the vernacular pits him against a literary device whose successful employment eludes all but the very best fiction writers. The narrative thus bogs down at times, and often wanders into stereotypes which, while common during the era, are now worn so thin as to simply be offensive. Finally, in his quest to add color, Levy sometimes gives this story a lot more detail than it really can absorb. Minor points occasionally wind up repeated on the same page or even the same paragraph.

Still, Levy obviously loves his subject, and he knows this world intimately. The author and his work are at their best when relating anecdotes about 1950s sports-car racing, and of course this, in the end, is the book's main goal. Levy has a natural sense of humor and his characters are believable, even if they do seem more like caricatures than human beings.- Mike Greenfield

ISORIVOLTA: The Men, The Machines
By Winston Scott Goodfellow
520 pages, 900 b/w and 125 color illustrations, $150.00
Published by: Giorgio Nada Editore
US distribution: Box 717
Menlo Park CA 94026
fax (415) 327-8051

Marque histories are an iffy proposition. The vast majority of this genre are lengthy sermons to the converted a second-hand slurry of factually questionable anec- dotes, optimistic magazines articles and outright public-relations apocrypha.

To my great relief, however, Winston Goodfellow's ISORIVOLTA, The Men, The Machines is a rare exception to this rule. This 6-pound tome proves to be an outstanding piece of research, a lavishly illustrated book and an engaging read to boot. Thus, I'm happily spared the task of skewering a fellow SCI staffer's 6-year-long project in print. (Not that he'd hesitate to do it either, mind you...)

You'd think there wouldn't be much to say about Iso, of whose American-engined GTs less than 1700 overall were made. But any organization that plans factories, builds products, constructs beautiful cars and struggles to survive in a tough and vibrant industry is going to have a fascinating tale to tell. To get it out in print only takes an author who's willing to do the hard work, primary research and critical thinking that good history demands. (And, of course, a publisher who's smart enough to appreciate the resulting work's value.)

For ISORIVOLTA, Goodfellow interviewed everyone from world-famous designers and engineers to production-line workers and retired salesmen. He wormed his way into the Rivolta family's private files and archives to find documentation to corroborate or disprove the recollections of his subjects. He collected literally thousands of pieces of supporting evidence to back up his authorative figures and timelines. And perhaps most importantly, the author made his scope wide enough to explain the environment and personalities that caused events to happen, not just recounted the events themselves.

The resulting manuscript examines Iso's rise from a refrigerator and heater manufacturer before World War II to a constructor of scooters, motorcycles, bubblecars and eventually high-performance exotica and racing cars by the middle of the 1960s. But it also critically and rationally looks at the conduct of Iso's affairs once the firm entered this realm, andexpertly recounts the friction, stumbles and outside events that led to its agonizing collapse.

By resisting the urge to write a hagio-graphy of the marque he so clearly loves, Goodfellow is able to accurately portray Iso as a microcosm of the exotic-car industry at large. And why not? The small firm's history includes many of the same players that Lamborghini's, Ferrari's or any other Italian GT builder's might.

In the end, this is why ISORIVOLTA works. While it does provide the only definitive work on this hitherto undocumented company, it is ultimately an engaging case study of a much larger topic. By concentrating on the personalities and relationships that were driving events during Italy's heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, ISORIVOLTA is as much an examination of the world of automotive exotica generally as a study of one particular make. In short, it's an example of how to do history right.- Mark Terrapelli