(Doubleday, $27.50)
For several years beginning in the late 1960s, Evel Knievel was “the coolest man on earth,” said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. By tracing the life of the motorcycle daredevil from his outlaw youth to brief superstardom and beyond, Leigh Montville’s “outlandishly entertaining” biography helps us remember why. Born Robert Knievel in 1938, this son of a hardscrabble Montana mining town styled himself a star-spangled American hero when he’d rev up his Harley and attempt—often unsuccessfully—to soar over cars, buses, cougars, and practically anything else that would draw an audience. He was a circus performer and “existential outlaw” rolled into one.
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Even while savoring Knievel’s antics, Montville “builds a brutal, nearly airtight case” against the stuntman’s character, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Knievel was a serial liar, an anti-Semite, and a misogynist who slept with hundreds of women and beat his wife. By the time he flopped in his 1974 attempt to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon in a homemade rocket, the press was turning against him. Knievel eventually spent time in jail for attacking a man with a bat, and ended his years as a sad spectacle. Long before its subject dies, from lung cancer, in 2007, this book’s florid style grows wearying. But there are worse crimes. “Evel is never dull.
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feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”