100 books like Janet Guthrie

Hellé Nice had lived a full life before she ever sat behind the wheel.

A career as a model and dancer in Paris enabled her to live a life of luxury in the 1920s, but when she injured her knee skiing in 1929, she turned to a new career: Motor racing.

She went on to compete in races around Europe, setting world records behind the wheel of her bright blue Bugatti.

A freak accident nearly killed her in 1936, and the onset of World War II brought racing to an end. Nice's lush lifestyle saw her accused of being a Nazi collaborator, and records of her accomplishments were scrubbed from the racing world.

Miranda Seymour tracks down Nice's complex legacy and reports it in vivid fashion.

The setting is interwar Europe.

The players are René Dreyfus, a Jewish racing driver, and Lucy Schell, a racing driver and American heiress.

As antisemitism crept through the continent, Dreyfus' successful racing career was choked out by the might of state-funded German engineering—at least, until Schell came along.

With her ample fortune and a home in Paris, Schell began funding her own racing team and immediately signed Dreyfus. Later, when the pressures of Nazi ideology threatened Dreyfus' life, Schell funded a "trip" to the Indianapolis 500 in America in order to help him start a new life.

Faster highlights the complex ways that politics, religion, money, and motorsport intertwine, told so compellingly that you won't want to put this book down.

Back when AAA sanctioned auto racing events in the 1920s, Black men were barred from racing at the highest competitive levels and were subjected to scathing remarks and racism at smaller local venues.

The Brown Bullet tells the story of Rajo Jack, one of the first Black drivers in America who broke down barriers just for a chance to show up at the track.

Even today, Black racers face undue prejudice when attempting to enter a predominately white sport; this book sheds light on the origins of that entrenched discrimination.

Roberta Cowell made history as the first British transgender woman to undergo gender-affirming surgery, but that isn’t the extent of her story.

She was also a fighter pilot in World War II who survived five months in a prisoner-of-war camp and a race car driver.

Though she was able to find doctors willing to provide her with the surgery that would affirm her gender identity, she gave up so much in the process, including a race car engineering company and her motorsport career.

Her autobiography is a poignant reminder of how far we've come in the subsequent decades.

Formula 1 may now be a multi-billion dollar industry that is watched by millions around the world every other weekend, but it was not always like that.

The origins of the sport go back to the start of the 20th century, and I’ve always put history book Power and Glory (which comes in two volumes) as perhaps the best exploration of those early years.

Through his detailed research, and the use of impressive archive photos, William Court’s hefty volumes offer some great insight into the legends of the past where grand prix motor racing was almost unrecognisable from how it is today.

What I most enjoyed about the book was the description of the famous eclipse flight of Concorde 001 in 1973, a flight in which one of the authors had a senior role. As the track of a solar eclipse sweeps across the Earth, lucky watchers in the right place, at the right time, see totality for a maximum of a few minutes.

Somehow, French astronomers managed to obtain permission to use the prototype supersonic aircraft to attempt to keep up with the shadow of the Moon. The flight was a phenomenal success, allowing the scientists onboard to observe a phenomenal 74 minutes of totality. This record has not been equaled in the half-century since, nor is it likely to be equaled for a long time to come.

I love this book! Of course, it teaches the mathematics of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian approaches to classical mechanics. But its real uniqueness lies in how the author explains the basic concepts of the subject with a constant emphasis on intuitive physics. It was only after reading Lanczos that I finally understood what variational calculations were really about. Ditto for virtual work, non-holonomic constraints, Liouville’s theorem and Hamilton-Jacobi theory. I barely noticed that I was learning about the history and philosophy of classical mechanics at the same time.

When a world-class philosopher of physics is also a spectacularly gifted writer, you have the makings of an extraordinary book. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to various interpretations of quantum mechanics, while Maudlin's companion volume on the philosophy of space and time is equally highly recommended. Maudlin is a (very) opinionated guide, which makes these books even more valuable (and enjoyable to read). I especially enjoy Maudlin’s refusal to tolerate any of the nonsense that one often finds in quantum mechanics textbooks that depict the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics as indeed a genuine interpretation of quantum mechanics. Rather, as Maudlin forthrightly says, the “Copenhagen interpretation” amounts to a failure to offer any interpretation at all of quantum mechanics. Instead, it treats quantum mechanics merely as a device for predicting the chances of our making various observations.

Beller did a lot of the historical work that Becker relies on, delving deeply into the personal interaction between Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and the other founders of quantum theory. The presentation is more scholarly than Becker’s but is a goldmine for anyone who wants to understand the fine details of how quantum theory emerged from that set of distinctive personalities.

The early period of the development of quantum mechanics were heady days, full of fascinating characters and factional infighting. As Europe was about to tear itself apart again, the physics community had also fractured. Jones explains the scientific fault lines and the personal relations (some of them quite racy!) that were in play as the modern theory of the atom unfolded.