Confessions of a Fast Woman - Softcover

Hazleton, Lesley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201632047 ISBN 13: 9780201632040

Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 1992

Synopsis

A car columnist for Lear's magazine reveals her infatuation with fast cars, describing how she learned to handle a formula race car and became a mechanic's apprentice.

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Reviews

Eager to write the car column for Lear's magazine from an immediate, concrete viewpoint, Hazleton ( Where Mountains Roar ) undertook to become a racing driver. She did so with great success, and her book infectiously conveys her enthusiasm for speed ("a state of being") and the sense of freedom it brings. She also has her say about what driving over a track at 200 m.p.h. means to someone raised in a world where women were expected to be passive, docile and either afraid or unwilling to test their strength. After mastering the art of racing, Hazleton worked repairing cars in a small-town garage, finding that the public views mechanics with the same reverence it lavishes on doctors. Finally, feeling guilty about rhapsodizing over cars with internal combustion engines (cars with the worst of all pollutants), Hazleton (who considers herself an environmentalist) cultivated an interest in battery-powered vehicles, which she ambivalently presents as the autos of the future--ecologically responsible, she knows, but "too divorced from that visceral experience that had come to mean motion and speed to me." Her book is a pleasure to read.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The car columnist for Lear's sets out to determine ``the hold of internal combustion over our imaginations and our lives.'' Although her first name is noncommittal, Hazleton (England, Bloody England, 1989, etc.) happens to be a woman, a fact that she makes much of--and rightly so--in the male world of gear-shifting, engine grease, and torque. Her odyssey into Autoland becomes also a study in ``transgression,'' the crossing of boundaries set not only around gender but also around propriety, fear, death. At first, she sputters along an utterly predictable track: ``road, machine, and driver were blended into a single entity, an unholy union of asphalt and steel and flesh.'' But soon she kicks into fifth gear, roaring in a Formula Ford around a Connecticut racetrack (``I drove through my terror''), even finding ``direct, physical sexual arousal behind the wheel of a powerful car at speed.'' Racing, she learns, is not a matter of taking risks but of gaining control. She steps up to a Lamborghini, and at 155 mph finds the limits of her skill. Here, the book takes a sharp curve- -into a second book, in effect--as Hazleton becomes a mechanic's apprentice in Vermont. The pace slows. She falls in love with her pink mechanic's rag, with exploded diagrams of engine parts, with the tools of the trade. To her astonishment, it appears that the secret life of cars, ``a mystery peculiar to the male gender,'' is but ``a reasonable matter of mechanical cause and effect.'' Still, her conscience is troubled--while cars thrill, they also pollute. Environmental itchiness leads to an anticlimactic finale--a sidebar of sorts tacked on to the two books--as Hazleton tracks down engineering genius Paul MacCready, champion of the nonpolluting electric car. Still, apart from the structural creaks, a sleek, exciting, V-8 performance. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The "fast woman" in the title is actually Hazleton, a columnist and automotive reviewer. She delves into the psychology of speed and driving with precision analyses that cut across the so-called gender gap. Here is described in highly readable style the union of car and driver. A female auto reviewer is not unusual, but until now, such intense, joyously provocative prose on the thrill of driving was unavailable from authors of either sex. This is a book for all readers and will be enjoyed by all who recognize someone who has found something new and exciting inside themselves. Highly recommended.
- Eric C. Shoaf, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201632047
• ISBN 13: 9780201632040
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200