Montezuma's Ferrari: And Other Adventures — Burt S. Levy

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.