Montezuma’s Ferrari

Description

The second novel in author/racer "BS" Levy's hilarious, historically accurate coming-of-age story about a blue-collar, 19-year-old New Jersey gas station mechanic/narrator Buddy Palumbo getting swept up in the glamorous, dangerous, upper-crust, and occasionally decadent world of open-road sportscar racing during the Eisenhower fifties. This time, Buddy's adventures take us from the shop floor of the gas station where he works to the shotgun seat of a Ferrari driven by a crazy, colorful, and charismatic Mexican in the 1952 La Carrera Panamericana, an unbelievable-but-true open-road race that ran from the southern tip of Mexico to the Rio Grande, all the way to an artists, academics, beatniks, and jazz musicians New Years Eve party that runs from the entire floor of an apartment building in Greenwich Village to Times Square. Winner of a 2000 Benjamin Franklin Book of the Year award. B.S. Levy has been racing and writing about it for almost 50 years. He "earned his spurs" working as a parts counterman, a mechanic, a shop owner, an upscale car salesman (during which time he had a Rolls-Royce convertible taken from him at gunpoint on a test drive), a successful amateur and semi-pro racing driver, an award winning motoring journalist, and served as a stunt driver when The Blues Brothers movie was shooting in Chicago. His The Last Open Road series of novels have earned rave reviews everywhere and become genuine cult classics. It’s an accurate, entertaining, authoritative and utterly hilarious novel about a 19-year-old, blue-collar New Jersey gas-station mechanic coming of age against the backdrop of the glamorous, dangerous, upper-crust and occasionally decadent world of open-road sports car racing during the early 1950s. Originally self-published, this book has earned rave reviews everywhere, is heading into its 11th hardcover printing and has become a genuine cult classic on the motorsports and collector-car scenes. It has also been used in several high school and college-level English classes and is on the recommended reading lists at many libraries and book stores.