The Last Open Road

I am a complete fan of this book; we kept it in the car and I read it aloud to my husband on long cross-country drives. Cartoonish? I wouldn't say so, unless you feel that the history of early road racing is cartoonish. We found the depictions to be a wonderful time capsule that made us wish we could go back and experience some of that for ourselves.

If you are the kind of person who is even considering the purchase of this book, then you are exactly the kind of person who will get enormous rewards from reading the entire B.S. Levy trilogy about mechanic Buddy Palumbo. I have purchased many copies of this book for my "car buddies" and even their wives have commented to me about how their men could not the put book down once they started. B.S. has finally written the great american "autosport" novel. Buy this book!

Levy's strong treatise on the adventures of Buddy Polumbo and Company speaks volumes on life in the blue collar, Italian-American world of early 1950's North Jersey and its class struggle with the upper crust, and resonates with the efforts on an ambitious young man to break out and better himself. His mechanical talents and work ethic are merely the vehicles through which he strives to improve his lot and that of his loved ones. The central plot need not have been about sports car racing to be effective, but could have applied equally to athletics or any industrial enterprise. Notwithstanding the above, those who love racing and wish to understand its roots in America will find new inpiration for their passion in B.S. Levy's excellent book. One wonders what an effective screen treatment this would make with Paul Newman in the role of an older Buddy Polumbo, reviewing the growth of Sports Car racing in America through flashback. You can almost hear the clanking of tools and cursing of Old Man Finzio in an open work bay of the Sinclair on a hot July afternoon as we fade to the first scene. A must read!

The Last Open Road, by B.S. Levy is one of the most entertaining and true to life books ever written. If you have ever raced, or just hung out with racers, you'll recognize about every character in the book. If you've ever turned a wrench (or tried to) on a car, you'll find yourself reliving those experiences over and over. You'll also find yourself wanting to travel to the places mentioned in the book. The story is also a glimpse into a time gone by. According to everyone I've talked with at my club (what the S.C.M.A. becomes twenty years later) that's really how it used to be. Do yourself a favor - buy the book, already. I can also recommend Montezuma's Ferrari, recently published.

The Kirkus review above strains unsuccessfully to avoid condescension, by complaining gently that BSL is not exactly Thomas Pynchon. But the reviewer is not, obviously, someone moved to spontaneous delight by sports car techno-minutiae. Levy knows that Austin Healy exhaust systems hang impossibly low to actually drive on a real street; that the last 10% of any engine swap takes 90% of the time, that very long drives in a 50's jaguar roadster are ultimately, torture. Good coming-of-age stories centered around car culture are all pretty formulaic, but it doesn't matter: We love the detail, the smell of oil, scraped knuckles, and the sound of an engine you've just finished rebuilding roaring to life for the first time. If you are new to the genre, see The Red Car, Boy gets Car, Hot Rod, and, of course, Stroker Ace.