The Race to the Future: 5000 Miles to Paris - The Adventure that Accelerated the Twentieth Century

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Description

In June 1907 five automobiles, with sponsors including Louis Vuitton, Pirelli, Dunlop and Mumm Champagne, roared over a start line near the Forbidden City in Beijing. Two continents, two months and 8,000 miles later, they had changed the world.

Their quest took the racers over mountain ranges, through forests and across deserts. With few roads, they drove on muddy tracks amidst donkeys, carts and people on foot. Their automobiles crashed through spindly wooden bridges and had to be floated across rivers. Rifts developed between rival participants and a global audience followed every twist and turn with bated breath, devouring reports telegraphed to journalists across the world.

The Peking-Paris took place on the precipice of a new world, born out of profound social, cultural and technological change. Race to the Future is not only a gripping, immersive narrative of the race, capturing the unbelievable events that took place, but it is a kaleidoscopic expose revealing how this overlooked moment in history shaped how we live today.

From the departure of the horse economy and birth of the automobile, gendered marketing and the secret history of women in motoring, and the invention of the telegraph and emergence of global mass media, to the Communist Revolution in Russia, mass production in America, the subsequent rivalry between the countries, and the First World War, which ultimately redefined the course of history.

Author Bio

Kassia St Clair studied the history of women's dress and the masquerade during the eighteenth century at Bristol and Oxford. She has since written about design and culture for the Economist, House & Garden, TLS, Quartz and New Statesman, and has had a column about colour in Elle Decoration since 2013. Her first book The Secret Lives of Colour was a top-ten bestseller, a Radio 4 Book of the Week and has been translated into over a dozen languages; her second, The Golden Thread, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award. She lives in London.

www.kassiastclair.com