OUTDOORS & ADVENTURE
Motorcycles & Cars
12 books
Twelve books about machines and the people who love them — motorcycles, cars, and the specific culture of speed, independence, and mechanical self-sufficiency that surrounds them. The list covers racing history, the memoir tradition of long motorcycle journeys, the cultural history of specific cars and their meanings, the mechanical writing that tries to explain what an engine is and why it matters, and a few books that use the machine as the lens for something larger about American culture and the freedom it promises. The motorcycle and the car are both objects and ideas; the best books about them understand both.
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The Motorcycle Diaries
Ernesto Guevara
In 1952, a 23-year-old Argentine medical student named Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado rode a decrepit Norton motorcycle named La Poderosa — The Mighty One — through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, watching it fall apart beneath them and eventually abandoning it entirely. Guevara kept a journal. What he saw — the copper miners, the dispossessed indigenous communities, the specific texture of Latin American poverty — radicalized him completely and produced the man who became Che. This journal, published posthumously, is the primary source document of the Cold War's third world revolutionary politics: the moment a young man from a middle-class Buenos Aires family looked at the continent beneath him and decided something had to change. Jon Lee Anderson's Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life is the definitive biography of everything that followed from this journey.
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an odd book, really. It’s part memoir, part philosophy, part fiction (based on, at times, a semi-delusional take on all of those), and it’s all quite interesting and strangely inspiring. The book is based around a road trip a father and son took in the mid years of the latter half of the 20th century, yet it spreads out to everything from metaphysics to motorcycle repair to music to madness. Almost every reader will see a least a piece of himself or herself in these strange, unparalleled pages. Buy at Amazon
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The Reckoning
David Halberstam
Already primary on the Political History & Power list — cross-reference here for the labor dimension. Ford and Nissan, American deindustrialization, the specific failure mode of an industry that stopped listening to the people making the product. The best single account of what happened to American manufacturing.
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Go Like Hell
A.J. Baime
In 1963, Henry Ford II tried to buy Ferrari and Enzo Ferrari walked away from the deal at the last minute, humiliating Ford in front of his own executives. Ford's response was to build a racing program from scratch, hire Carroll Shelby, and spend three years and whatever it cost to beat Ferrari at Le Mans — the 24-hour endurance race that Ferrari had dominated for six consecutive years. Baime spent years reconstructing the 1966 race and the corporate war behind it, and the result is the most purely readable auto racing book in print: the engineers, the drivers, the money, and the specific drama of two manufacturers sending men to their deaths in pursuit of a trophy neither needed and both required. Around 274 pages. The overview entry and the natural starting point for any reader coming to this list cold.
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Sunday Money
Jeff MacGregor
MacGregor and his wife spent the entire 2001 NASCAR season driving a motorhome from race to race across the American South and Midwest, living in the infield and documenting what they found. What they found was not the redneck cartoon of coastal media coverage but something more interesting: a specific American subculture organized around speed, loyalty, and the specific pleasure of watching very large things go very fast in circles, populated by people who knew exactly what they loved and why. Around 370 pages and the funniest book on this list — MacGregor's eye for the absurdity of his own position as an outsider trying to understand something from the inside is the whole engine of the book. The travel entry, the humor entry, and the best account of what NASCAR actually means to the people who follow it.
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Jupiter's Travels
Ted Simon
In 1973, Ted Simon left London on a Triumph Tiger 100 with no fixed plan and rode around the world. Four years and 78 countries later he returned. Jupiter's Travels is the account of those years — the breakdowns, the border crossings, the jails, the hospitality of strangers on five continents, and what happens to a man who submits himself to genuine uncertainty for long enough. It is the best motorcycle travel book ever written and one of the best travel books in any category. Simon was not young when he left — he was 42 — which gives the journey a weight that younger adventures lack. The overview entry for motorcycle culture on this list. Cross-references to the Travel Memoirs and Explorers & Adventurers Bios lists.
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Hell's Angels
Hunter S. Thompson
In 1964, Thompson embedded himself with the Hell's Angels for a year, riding with them and attending their runs before one of them beat him severely enough that the experiment ended. What he wrote was not the exposé the publisher wanted but an anthropological document treating the Angels as a genuine social phenomenon — men whom postwar America had produced and then discarded, expressing their resentment at the only volume available to them. The primary source entry and the most uncomfortable book on this list: Thompson's sympathy for his subjects is real and it complicates the easy judgments. Cross-references to the Outlaws & Rogues Bios list.
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The Limit
Michael Cannell
The 1961 Formula One season was the most dangerous in the sport's history. Cannell follows Phil Hill — a quiet Californian who became the first American world champion — and Wolfgang von Trips, his Ferrari teammate who was leading the championship when his car went into the crowd at Monza, killing himself and fifteen spectators. Where Go Like Hell is about corporate ambition, this is about what racing cost the men inside the cars. Cannell worked from Hill's diaries and period sources, and the detail — the circuits, the machines, the culture of absolute risk — is exact. The deep cut on this list: well-researched, largely unread, and better than most books with ten times the name recognition.
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Ghost Rider
Neil Peart
In 1997, Peart — the drummer for Rush — lost his daughter in a car accident and his wife to cancer ten months later. He dealt with it by getting on a BMW motorcycle and riding 55,000 miles across North America and into Mexico over the following fourteen months. Ghost Rider is the journal he kept on that ride: the roads, the motels, the border crossings, and the slow and uneven process of a man putting himself back together through motion. Peart is a better writer than most musicians and a more precise observer of landscape than most travel writers. The emotional depth entry on this list. Cross-references to the Books on Death & How to Face It and Travel Memoirs lists.
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Enzo Ferrari
Brock Yates
Enzo Ferrari built racing cars because he needed them to fund the road cars he was required to sell to keep the operation running, and he treated both drivers and customers with variations of the same calculated indifference. Yates spent years on the biography and had access to Italian sources most American journalists didn't, and the portrait he produces is of a man who was genuinely brilliant and also deeply cruel — who let drivers die rather than admit the cars were dangerous, who manipulated journalists and customers with the same instrument. The biography entry on this list. Read alongside Go Like Hell, where Ferrari appears as the antagonist, and The Limit, where his cars kill his own driver.
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Car
Harry Crews
Herman Mack has decided to eat a Ford Maverick. Not metaphorically — he intends to consume it piece by piece, filing the metal into powder and ingesting it on a schedule, while promoters sell tickets to watch. Crews was a novelist from rural Georgia who wrote about the specific texture of American working-class life with the detachment of a man who had survived it, and Car is his darkest and funniest book. Under 200 pages. The fiction entry on this list, and the humor entry, and the book about cars that has nothing to do with driving. Almost nobody has read it. Cross-references to the American Fiction Classics list.
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Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Matthew Crawford
Crawford has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago and quit a think tank job to open a motorcycle repair shop — and this book is the argument for why that was the rational choice. Around 246 pages of the most persuasive case available for the value of manual competence: the specific satisfaction of work that produces a verifiable result, the way skilled trades require more genuine intelligence than knowledge work admits, and the specific impoverishment of a culture that stopped teaching boys to make and fix things. The AoM reader who has ever felt more alive fixing an engine than writing a memo will find his experience documented and defended here. Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance makes the same argument through a motorcycle trip and a full epistemology — cross-seeds with the Travel Memoirs reading on this project.