Against Gravity

Readers would be well advised to skip the first 150 pages of this overstuffed tome in which retired ad executive McCabe details the seemingly interminable preparations he and his then-fiancee, Carolyn, a fashion photographer, made to participate in the Paris/Dakar Rallye, an 8000-mile car race. His account of the race itself, however, on a course that covers portions of Africa's most rugged terrain, is exciting. Most haunting are McCabe's observations of the confounding poverty of Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal; he notes, but does not stress, the irony of driving $90,000 automobiles through villages on the edge of starvation. Anticlimax ensues when McCabe is disqualified from the race for running out of gas. In all, his chronicle is probably best suited to the short span of a magazine article. (June)