Build the Perfect Beast: The Quest to Design the Coolest Car Ever Made [Hardcover]

Mark Christensen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0312268734 | ISBN-13: 978-0312268732 | Edition: 1st

Mark Christensen grew up with a simple dream-to build a 600 horsepower suicide machine able to accelerate from zero to sixty in less time than it takes to read this sentence. When a friend offers him $100,000 to realize that dream, Christensen enlists Nick Pugh, the best young auto designer in the country. An idealistic, charismatic, twenty-two year old star student from the celebrated Art Center for Design in Pasadena, Pugh shows Christensen his sketches of the Xeno I-drawings that are stunningly original and strangely familiar-"as if they were the best ideas I never had." Thus inspired, the author sets out to assemble a "best of the best" group of engineers, mechanics and fabricators.

But the dream becomes grander and the designs of the Xeno evolve spectacularly after the endlessly hard working utopian Pugh develops an ingenious method for automobiles to triple their driving range. And as new and wilder Xenos fly from Pugh's monster imagination, nothing seems impossible. That is until the author discovers that $100,000 may not even pay for the hubcaps that Pugh has envisioned.

Build the Perfect Beast is a window into 21st century technology and cutting edge design at its most relevant and bizarre-an epic odyssey about craft, cars, opportunity and ambition that sizzles like American Graffiti on acid. This is a classic tale of chasing down the American dream.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A writer, a physician and a designer team up to create "the greatest car in the world" in this testosterone-fueled paean to individual genius and America's fascination with automobiles. Christensen receives an offer of $100,000 from his physician friend Gideon Bosker to help build his dream car, and Christensen convinces Nick Pugh, "America's best young car designer," to join the project. Pugh quickly emerges as the book's dominant character: intense and uncompromising, he is a bizarre hybrid of Picasso, Eminem and Ayn Rand's Howard Roark. It's largely Pugh's vision that keeps the quest alive through years of frustration, fund-raising and fantastical detours (including an ill-fated attempt to power the car using a secret hydrogen-compound formula). After nearly a decade, the trio finally succeeds in building a shocking, mobile work of art called the Xeno III. And what is done with this "steel hallucination," this "captured UFO," once it is finished? It's kept in a garage in southern California and is rarely driven. As frustrating as this anticlimax is, however, it's the least of the book's problems. More troublesome is Christensen's lack of focus and discrimination. Seemingly everything from his own life during this period went into the narrative, from his visit to a Lollapalooza concert to his difficulties publishing a novel. On the positive side, Christensen knows his probable audience well and maintains a suitably aggressive, masculine tone throughout. His description of vomiting after too much beer and pizza may win over some readers, but for most, such delights will not be enough. 16-page color photo insert not seen by PW. (Nov. 16)Forecast: St. Martin's will need more than gasoline to get this title moving; its only chance is niche marketing and publicity to old-school techies and race car buffs.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This book reads so much like fiction that readers may be tempted to search the Internet to find out if the people here really exist. It's hardly believable, for instance, that someone actually thought he was going to build a one-of-a-kind car powered by a derivative of water. And did Christensen (The Sweeps: Behind the Scenes in Network TV) really think his twentysomething designer, fresh out of design school, was a w?nderkind who could make his dream-car a reality? This is only part of the plot, and, unfortunately, not all the questions are answered here. The story of building the Xeno, a car to embody advanced technology and design, plays out over nearly a decade and includes several digressions into Christensen's own childhood. Some of the more detailed text about the car's design can be hard to follow, but there are enough twists and turns in the narrative to make this enjoyable reading. Toward the end, the reader learns that one of the many deals the author made to get the car built was that a book would be written about it. When neither car nor book was finished, the publisher sued the author. Christiansen eventually found someone else to publish the book, though in ultimately unfinished form. As such, the reader never finds out what happened with the car. A recent web search turned up this information about the Xeno: it is available for sale for one million dollars. Eric C. Shoaf, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence, RI
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (November 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312268734
• ISBN-13: 978-0312268732
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,225,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fulfilling a childhood dream has its pitfalls -- and rewards, March 17, 2002

By 

Kenneth J Varnum - See all my reviews

This review is from: Build the Perfect Beast: The Quest to Design the Coolest Car Ever Made (Hardcover)

Build the Perfect Beast is the story of Mark Christensen's 5-year effort to fulfill his childhood dream: Build the perfect hot rod. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Christensen wanted to drive one of those high-performance street machines that all the California cool kids drove. As a high school or college student, however, he never had the talent or money to put together his dream vehicle. He never got past the tearing down part of the process. Until he met Nick Pugh, a talented young designer who has, since the events described in this book, gone on to bigger successes. The dream car Mark and Nick set out to build is the Xeno, a million-dollar one-of-a-kind fantasy on wheels. The book details the ups and downs -- mostly brief ups followed by prolonged downs -- of this process. Mark, an author, not an engineer, has vision to spare. Nick, a brilliant designer, refuses to let engineering realities interfere with his vision. The people that are attracted to the plan, lend their financing, and then walk away, are captured by the vision and become true believers, but, inevitably, are driven away by the complexities and vagaries of the other people involved. Mark puts himself into debt financing the car -- they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money, and that of investors, trying to make the car work. Less a story of personal triumph than a story of the weary reality of chasing a dream, this book is nonetheless satisfying to read. In the end, the car is built, but not the way anyone planned, and not the way anyone wanted.

Along with the engineering, design, and financial issues that haunt the protagonists, Christensen also weaves his own biography into the story, describing his lifelong dream of hotrods from grade school through the present [the book ends about 1995]. I found the biographical story more interesting than the car story, but by the end they have weaved together into a whole.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost great, October 9, 2002

By 

David Traver Adolphus "Debonair man-about-town" (Bennington, Vermont) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Build the Perfect Beast: The Quest to Design the Coolest Car Ever Made (Hardcover)

It is almost great, and I don't think it's Christensen's fault that it isn't. It is clearly the portrait of an obsession that consumed his life--all his money, his home, his family, but frankly, the editing leaves something to be desired. Several times while reading this book I turned to my wife--an editor--to ask if a confusing passage made any sense. It never did. This is a terrible frustration in an otherwise engrossing book.

In a way, it reflects the naivete that Christensen himself exhibits--why did a man who, frankly, knows almost nothing about cars think he can shanghai one of the most brilliant young designers of his generation and build a supercar for peanuts? Because he didn't know any better, is why. It's the same reason he doesn't know you can't run a car on water, and why you can't expect to raise millions of dollars without some sort of business, and why he gets suckered in by half the shysters in California. The force of his will and his dream are almost enough to overcome the obstacles of his ignorance and blind faith. If I had a million dollars, Mark, I'd give it to you.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The inner workings of making a dream come true, January 30, 2002

By 

Robert C. Hembrook (Austin, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Build the Perfect Beast: The Quest to Design the Coolest Car Ever Made (Hardcover)

OK, I have dreams of some day building my own super car with a massive mid mounted V8, incredible performance, etc. This is a book about a couple of guys who had the dream to go out and do it.

Mark Christensen is a writer who meets a designer, Nick Pugh, who is at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Nick has just made (ca 1990) auto design obsolete, and everyone at the school has become his clone or disciple. Mark convinces Nick to shy away from the big automakers and build the car, with the promise of $100,000 from a friend. The rest of the book goes on to describe two things:

1) The way Mark and his friends grew up in the car-crazy 50s and 60s with dreams of making super hot rods to impress the chicks.

2) The years long process of trying to build their perfect beast.

I'll say this about Mark's writing: I will do whatever I can to try and find the rest of his body of work. His sense of narrative and way of making events pop off the page is astonishing. I have not had this strong a desire to keep reading deep into the night since the last Nabokov novel I read. This man is a credit to writing and is to be admired for his wordcraft. His sentences evoke the images of a 40ish
guy reliving the triumphs, failures and regrets of "a generation that grew up under a tremendous lack of oppression". His hot rodder stories make you ache for the chance to make right the butchery that perfectly good iron suffered for the sake of "cool" on hot summer nights. The tales of the huge wheeling dealing finances, backed with barely being able to pay his rent bring all the dreams of automotive excess to shocking clarity. Its spine-tingling, laugh out loud, whack your forehead and groan all in one easy to carry hardback!

This novel has reinvigorated and frightened me all at the same time about my crazy schemes to make my own car. I believe it within the realm of possibility for me to turn my dreams someday into metal and fiberglass. I now know vividly just how hard a road it can be.

The characters in this very true story (the evolution of the design and pics of the final car, which is for sale, are available, wend their way through a wonderful array of characters from flimflam men, conspiracy theorists, alternative fuels, patent attorneys and the whole of SoCal speed shop and fabricator culture in their pursuit of the perfect machine. The cast of characters is numerous, the pace is hectic and the humor is everywhere, along with yearning, hope, fear and desperation.

This is simply the best bit of non fiction I have read in years.

Read it.

RangeR "Oh no! Now he's reviewing books too!" BoB