"Wilkinson is amused by life's inevitable disasters and humiliating blow-ups, trotting them out so everyone can laugh. This is half biography, half 'Zen and the Art of Porsche Maintenance.'" John Phillips, Car and Driver. I took to explaining that I was simply spending two years and $70,000 to make a brand-new 1983 Porsche that would never in my lifetime be worth more than twenty grand, tops. It was like the MasterCard commercials: "Car, $10,500. Parts, $59,900. Experience, priceless." A few people got it, most didn't. This book is for the people who Get It. �from the preface Stephan Wilkinson was looking for something to do. So he bought an old, rundown Porsche 911SC and over the next two years tore it apart and rebuilt it in a garage behind his house. The project cost a small fortune, and it started him thinking about many other things. Quirky, cool, entertaining, and opinionated, The Gold-Plated Porsche capture's Wilkinson's inspired digressions on his various other careers and misadventures. As a less-then-inspired Harvard student he had spent more time working on cars than on the books. During various Harvard sabbaticals he sweated out the lowest scut work available to tour the world as a merchant seaman. He built an airplane in his garage and flew it cross-country. He drove an ambulance. There was a short and unproductive association with a certain marijuana smuggler from Newfoundland, and the former Israeli intelligence officer who sought to entice Wilkinson into a lucrative but illicit career as a pilot. Wilkinson's flying skills did lead him, eventually, to become the chief, and only, pilot for Dennis Banks�one of the leaders of the controversial American Indian Movement. For a week or so, anyway. And there's his long and eventful writing career, which included an unfulfilling stint as editor in chief of the prestigious Car and Driver. As he recounts his own personal history, Wilkinson also waxes eloquent on the history of Porsche, American engineering and culture, status, and his love of flying and of all things mechanical, not to mention the integrity of wedding dress silk for engine repair. In The Gold-Plated Porsche, Stephan Wilkinson proves himself as adept at crafting a sentence as he is at rebuilding an exquisitely complicated engine. Published by The Globe Pequot Press. Hardcover. Copyright 2004. 214 pages.

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