Against Death And Time: One Fatal Season In Racing's Glory Years - Plot & Excerpts
HISTORIANS TEND TO DISMISS THE FIFTIES AS A decade of insipid, pastel-colored lassitude. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described it as a period of "repose" following the cataclysmic decades of the Depression-ridden thirties and the war-ravaged forties. Yet the nation was evidencing a latent restlessness, led in part by veterans returning from World War II and Korea who found the pallid innocence of daily life boring in the extreme. Coffeehouses in the major cities were filling with angry young men soon to be known as "beatniks" while outside, the streets thundered with newly formed motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels and the dreaded "hot-rodders" and their wild sport of "drag racing." A new generation of musicians were combining country music, western swing, and black rhythm and blues into a new sound called rock and roll. A struggling Kentuckyraised musician named Bill Haley and his new group, the Comets, had recorded "Rock round the Clock" in 1952. It was a modest success until a year later, when it became the theme song for Blackboard Jungle, Hollywood's first attempt to deal with disaffected youth and the newly discovered threat of "juvenile delinquency." In 1955 James Dean and Rebel without a Cause shook the establishment along with a mass of young, flat-to-the-floor rock and roll musicians including Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Chuck Berry, and the immortal Elvis Presley.Meanwhile, Detroit had discovered new sources of power through revolutionary, large-displacement V-8 engines, which triggered a "horsepower race" and prompted critics like writer John Keats to brand the chrome-encrusted monsters "insolent chariots." At the same time, Europeans were invading the shores with new "sports cars" and a strange, beetle-shaped economy car called the Volkswagen.
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