Still Life with Cars: An Automotive Memoir

Most childhood fascinations are a passing fancy, but something about cars tends to capture the imagination forever. Witness the countless backyard weed-wrapped classics, rusted just shy of a shadow, slated one day for a return to glory; cloudy vacation memories of choking exhaust, deafening engines and blinding chrome; countless white-knuckled highway moments as the driver faces backwards to better glimpse some passing oddity spotted four lanes over. Somehow, cars have a way of getting into a kid's blood. Any chronic condition requires a lifetime of maintenance. John Lumley caught the fever early--likely from a midnight blue Hudson--and it's been with him ever since.

This engaging memoir follows a life spent nursing an obsession with cars, fitting for a son of Detroit's heyday. With occasional play in the garage of the Ford estate and an excursion to see Buckminster Fuller's three-wheeled Dymaxion among his earliest memories, John Lumley's enduring love of cars is no surprise. From those childhood adventures followed a lifetime spent elbow-deep in engines--Nash, Hupmobile, Mercury, Citroen, Triumph, Volkswagen, Lagonda, Armstrong-Siddeley, Bentley and more, many of them pictured. Though his career was devoted to loftier pursuits, the grease beneath his nails perhaps best sums up Lumley's lifelong love. Fifty-eight photographs and an index accompany the text.