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Whitney Straight: Racing Driver, War Hero, Industrialist; The Authorised Biography Audiobook
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Publisher Description
Whitney Straight made his own way in life.
Born in New York with a silver spoon in his mouth, he would earn his living in the board rooms of some of Britain’s greatest companies. He dropped out of Cambridge to become an outstanding racing driver and run a team of Maseratis across Europe and Africa. A qualified pilot at seventeen, he revolutionized aircraft design for the enthusiast, and his extraordinary war experience saw him rise from Pilot Officer to Air Commodore. He survived the invasion of Norway, a crash-landing in occupied France, and a year as a PoW to emerge with an MC, DFC, and US Legion of Merit. Rejecting Churchill’s proposal of a career in politics, he became CEO of BOAC, transforming it into a national airline to be proud of. At Rolls-Royce, he railed against a company dominated by engineers who made poor businessmen and played a founding role in the separate paths of the aero and auto businesses still seen today.
An incurable romantic, he could never imagine being married to anyone other than his wife, yet he had numerous mistresses. Paul Kenny has been granted unfettered access to Straight’s diaries and photograph albums and has scoured archives on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving no stone unturned in pursuit of the full story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest mavericks.
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About Paul Kenny
Paul Kenny is one of the few chartered accountants with a degree in archaeology. His first book, The Man Who Supercharged Bond (Haynes, 2009) was described by chat show host and petrol-head Jay Leno as “one of the automobile books of the year, if not the automobile book of the year.”
About Simon Vance
Simon Vance (a.k.a. Robert Whitfield) is an award-winning actor and narrator. He has earned more than fifty Earphones Awards and won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration thirteen times. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and has been named an AudioFile Golden Voice as well as an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009. He has narrated more than eight hundred audiobooks over almost thirty years, beginning when he was a radio newsreader for the BBC in London. He is also an actor who has appeared on both stage and television.