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    The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me
    Unavailable
    The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me
    Unavailable
    The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me
    Ebook512 pages7 hours

    The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me

    By Nathaniel Benchley

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 16, 2010
    ISBN9780007331703
    Author

    Nathaniel Benchley

    Nathaniel Benchley was the author of several different types of books, as well as plays, movies and magazine articles. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, majoring in English. Shortly after graduation, he married Marjorie Bradford, and they settled down in New York City, where he worked for several newspapers and magazines. In 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the U. S. Navy and was later trained to command small PT attack boats. He served in the Navy in the North and South Atlantic theaters and was on his way to the Pacific campaign when the war ended in 1945. He returned to New York and joined his wife and five year-old son, Peter. The next year, they had another son, Nathaniel Robert. Nathaniel Benchley worked as a freelance writer –and painter- for the next 36 years. He wrote novels, plays, short stories, reviews, movie scripts and a very popular biography of the actor Humphrey Bogart. Much of his material was drawn from his life in New York and Nantucket, MA, where the family had a summer home. He found the small town life in Nantucket was rich in characters and material for adventures. He wrote a book titled The Off-Islanders, which was later made into a successful movie called "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" It was the story of a Russian submarine run aground on a small New England island. Several of his other books were also made into movies. His sideline as a painter of landscapes led to his participation in many gallery showings. Mr. Benchley used his fascination with history to create a series of books for beginning and teen readers. His particular interest was in taking a moment in history and examining it through the eyes of a young boy. He told stories about the Vikings coming to what would later be called "America;" Native American Indians dealing with the new settlers in their land ("Small Wolf"); young boys in Colonial America ("Sam the Minuteman" and "George the Drummer Boy") and the movement west; and a young boy who joins the Navy during World War II. He also wrote a series of books for very beginning readers, many of which were about animals and their special bonds with humans ("Red Fox and His Canoe," "Oscar Otter"). He was always proudest of the letters he got from young readers who had identified with one of his characters and wanted to ask questions raised by their reading. He personally answered every letter he got from his readers. In 1974, his son, Peter, published his first novel, Jaws, based on his experiences fishing off Nantucket in his youth (and a healthy imagination). For the last many years of his life, Nathaniel Benchley lived in Nantucket with his wife. Nathaniel Benchley lived by the motto: "A craftsman is one who does what he is given to do better than others feel is necessary."He died in Boston, MA, in 1981.

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    Reviews for The Man in the White Suit

    3.5/5

    24 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The 'in-visor' view from behind the scenes at Top Gear.
    • 3/5
      If you like Top Gear and want to read some (but maybe not enough) about the behind the scenes stuff, this is worth reading. The author certainly writes some fairly purple prose for a race car driver and then follows up with not just racing jargon, but English racing jargon which almost makes parts of the book unreadable. Not a bad read, just not a great one.
    • 4/5
      Too much army, not enough Top Gear. But still funny.
    • 4/5
      This is Ben Collins story about growing up in California, his time as a racecar driver, his work the army, and his role as the infamous "Splitter" Stig of Top Gear. I, of course, picked this up because I'm a huge fan of The Stig (and, yes, I know he went out in a less than satisfactory manner, but he's still "my" Stig), and I must say it was a much better read than I had expected. The writing is a little bit choppy in the beginning, but gets really good as it goes along until it's almost a page-turner. It's obvious that Collin's isn't a professional writer, but I think he did a fairly good job here, and if you're interested in our former Stig, it's quite a captivating read. If you are, however, looking for some dark secrets about Top Gear that would have justified the overblown lawsuit business, you need to look elsewhere - there's nothing here, apart from Collins' identity (which was about to be revealed anyway), that justifies the madness that ensued.
    • 3/5
      I purely read this book because I wanted to know more about The Stig and Top Gear. I didn’t really know anything about Ben Collins prior to this. This book reads more like an autobiography of Ben Collins up to his departure from Top Gear (although it is VERY sketchy on the details and reasons why this happened). We learn about his childhood (interesting), younger days riding karts and various cars (interesting), army days (quite boring) and then we hit Top Gear days. This was by far and away the best part of the book for me. It was interesting to learn that Collins was actually being the Stig on the tube (public transport vs car vs bike vs boat), I would have thought someone else would do that. Riding with Tom Cruise, teaching a blind man to drive the Top Gear track and Richard Hammond’s crash (covered by the man himself in On the Edge), it’s all there. Ben Collins can cover how to drive very fast really, really well. The stories about Top Gear were very entertaining and witty. But towards the end of the book, we suddenly hear about how he is tired about the extreme secrecy he must maintain in his role as The Stig, how he’s getting a bit tired of the whole thing and then…it’s over. Given that the BBC tried to put an injunction on the publication of this book, there must be more! Why does Jeremy Clarkson react so negatively when questioned about Collins as The Stig? Why does Collins himself seem so jealous when a decoy in the form of Michael Schumacher appears on the show? The ending, the leaving is tied up so quickly and perfectly in a big red bow you just know that it’s hiding a dirty big coffee stain underneath. A fairly interesting and light read, this would appeal to Top Gear fans (obviously) and boys interested in cars and racing. I’d also be interested in hearing about what Collins is doing now (surely being on Fifth Gear is incorrect?) but not enough to read another book.