Build the Perfect Beast
The Quest to Design the Coolest Car Ever Made
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Mark Christensen grew up with a simple dream-to build a 600 horsepower suicide machine able to accelerate from zero to sixty in less time than it takes to read this sentence. When a friend offers him $100,000 to realize that dream, Christensen enlists Nick Pugh, the best young auto designer in the country. An idealistic, charismatic, twenty-two year old star student from the celebrated Art Center for Design in Pasadena, Pugh shows Christensen his sketches of the Xeno I-drawings that are stunningly original and strangely familiar-"as if they were the best ideas I never had." Thus inspired, the author sets out to assemble a "best of the best" group of engineers, mechanics and fabricators.
But the dream becomes grander and the designs of the Xeno evolve spectacularly after the endlessly hard working utopian Pugh develops an ingenious method for automobiles to triple their driving range. And as new and wilder Xenos fly from Pugh's monster imagination, nothing seems impossible. That is until the author discovers that $100,000 may not even pay for the hubcaps that Pugh has envisioned.
Build the Perfect Beast is a window into 21st century technology and cutting edge design at its most relevant and bizarre-an epic odyssey about craft, cars, opportunity and ambition that sizzles like American Graffiti on acid. This is a classic tale of chasing down the American dream.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A writer, a physician and a designer team up to create "the greatest car in the world" in this testosterone-fueled paean to individual genius and America's fascination with automobiles. Christensen receives an offer of $100,000 from his physician friend Gideon Bosker to help build his dream car, and Christensen convinces Nick Pugh, "America's best young car designer," to join the project. Pugh quickly emerges as the book's dominant character: intense and uncompromising, he is a bizarre hybrid of Picasso, Eminem and Ayn Rand's Howard Roark. It's largely Pugh's vision that keeps the quest alive through years of frustration, fund-raising and fantastical detours (including an ill-fated attempt to power the car using a secret hydrogen-compound formula). After nearly a decade, the trio finally succeeds in building a shocking, mobile work of art called the Xeno III. And what is done with this "steel hallucination," this "captured UFO," once it is finished? It's kept in a garage in southern California and is rarely driven. As frustrating as this anticlimax is, however, it's the least of the book's problems. More troublesome is Christensen's lack of focus and discrimination. Seemingly everything from his own life during this period went into the narrative, from his visit to a Lollapalooza concert to his difficulties publishing a novel. On the positive side, Christensen knows his probable audience well and maintains a suitably aggressive, masculine tone throughout. His description of vomiting after too much beer and pizza may win over some readers, but for most, such delights will not be enough. 16-page color photo insert not seen by PW.
