Though auto racing remains a dangerous sport--witness last month's fatal crash by Indy winner Dan Wheldon--today's seat-belted and helmeted races seem sane and cautious compared to the breakneck carnage of the sport's postwar European years, a time when the fatalities sometimes included multiple spectators as torn car bodies became deadly projectiles. Given the subject matter, it's no surprise that this chronicle of the tragic 1961 Grand Prix circuit is thrilling. But Michael Cannell doesn't just rev up the exuberant prose his subject deserves; he also digs into the neurotic and outsized personalities of the drivers. The Limit is an obvious must-read for motorheads, but even those with no interest in auto racing will be entranced by the passionate account of these amazing men and their crazy lives.
While mild-mannered Californian Phil Hill is ostensibly Cannell's main focus, the other drivers who move in and out of Hill's path prove to be just as compelling. There is Wolfgang Von Trips, the reckless German aristocrat nicknamed "Count Von Crash"; Enzo Ferrari, the intimidating and mercurial patriarch of the Ferrari brand; and the debonair Stirling Moss, who once reportedly heard from a police officer who pulled him over for speeding: "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?"
Though there is an overhanging solemnity for the lives lost in The Limit, Cannell lets the reader linger in the temperate Mediterranean climate, recounting the Riviera-chic parties and Bardot-era beauties that marked time between the white-knuckled death matches these drivers called work. The mesmerizing story whizzes by, leaving readers with a sense of wonder at heroic foolishness as well as a ringing in the ears. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic