Hard Driving
250 pages, 6 x 9
49 halftones, 1 map
Paperback
Release Date:15 Jun 2020
ISBN:9781602234024
Hard Driving
The 1908 Auto Race From New York to Paris
By Dermot Cole
SERIES:
Classic Reprint Series
University of Alaska Press
In the winter of 1908, six cars left Times Square bound for Paris. They were embarking on a remarkable motor race across the world that would capture everyone’s imagination. In this book, Dermot Cole weaves a thrilling account of the improbable journey west from New York to Paris, the varied characters, and the nascent automobile industry. Drawing from the drivers’ journals and extensive newspaper reports, Cole details the many hardships, triangulations, and physical extremes encountered along the route as the drivers attempted to race from coast to coast, cross the Bering Strait to Russia, traverse Siberia, and onward.
Hard Driving delves beyond the riveting headlines to explore the race’s implications for global politics and diplomacy and how the automobile became a viable mode of transportation.
Hard Driving delves beyond the riveting headlines to explore the race’s implications for global politics and diplomacy and how the automobile became a viable mode of transportation.
Dermot Cole, a resident of Alaska since 1974, grew up at several places in the world, has published both journalistic and academic style history, and first published this work in 1991. Of the nearly global circumferencing implicit in this book’s contents, several chapters certainly highlight aspects of the American West: adventurous travel West as far as Alaska while it was a territory and a pioneering phase of the fledgling automobile industry.
Dermot Cole has worked as a newspaper columnist in Alaska for more than forty years. He is the author of several books, including Fairbanks: A Gold Rush Town That Beat the Odds.
