The Bookworm Critique

As you will no doubt have read elsewhere in this special edition of the autosport.com journal, Michael Schumacher's career has been one of tremendous contrasts. It's entirely fitting, then, that this should carry over to the books that have been written about him.

Statistically, Schumacher has produced the greatest career in Formula One history and he has done it during an era that has seen the most comprehensive media coverage ever. The sheer volume of books that form an unsteadily teetering tower beside me as I type is not, therefore, a surprise. Neither is the fact that they all suffer from the same problem.

For all the hundreds of thousands of words - probably millions, actually - they all fail to answer the same fundamental questions. As the media becomes ever more sophisticated, so does the PR machinery designed to filter the information that is eventually transmitted.

The result of all this is that I have any number of titles that I can reach for if I want to look up some statistics (never happens - stats bore me), or find a generic quote from Ross Brawn or Jean Todt in the aftermath of, say, their successful 2000 championship. If I want to know something about Michael as a man though, I'm going to struggle.

I would, however, not be completely destitute. James Allen, ITV commentator, produced what remains my favourite Schumacher book about six years ago when he cooked up 'The Quest For Redemption'; a book that was reissued a few months later with three extra chapters and a new title: 'Driven To Extremes'.

Allen's premise was fairly simple - Schumacher's gift is truly unique, so why on earth does he keep doing stupid things? And then, no matter how damning the evidence, why does he find it so hard to accept blame? (Allen, an Oxford alumni, put it far more elegantly than that of course).

Allen's book shows its age in that it signs off with Schumacher's return from injury in late 1999, and therefore misses the run of five world championships with Ferrari that began the following year. But it's still the most complete, and most competent, attempt to tackle Schumacher's most confounding qualities head-on. I'm not sure whether it is still in print, but if it doesn't yet occupy a space on your bookshelf then you should still be able to unearth a used copy. It's well worth the effort.

If a copy of Allen's book proves too elusive, then you could do worse than settle for Timothy Collings's 'Team Schumacher', which hit the stands last year. In the past I have found Collings's books a bit hit-and-miss, but this is easily one of his better efforts. It's not strictly a Schumacher book - although Michael gets a good run, Collings puts all the key architects behind the current Ferrari dynasty under the microscope in an effort to pin down how the Scuderia works.

And as far as possible, he extends this to include the protagonists' more Machiavellian aspects as well as their genius. It's one of the few genuinely informative (and occasionally even revelatory) Schumacher/Ferrari books to have come my way, and is well worth checking out irrespective of whether or not you are a Prancing Horse devotee.

My third choice for inclusion into the list of 'Schumacher Books That I Am Pleased To Own' surprises even myself, not least because I know a lot of other journalists hated it. 'Schumacher: The Official Inside Story of the Formula One Icon' was written by Sabine Kehm, Michael's long-time assistant, so it stands to reason that you are getting Michael's story spun exactly the way he wants it to be. Yet despite that, it comes across as giving what seems to be a far more personal and often more insightful look at Schumacher as a person than is the norm.

Now, I am not going to pretend to be in the position to tell you whether or not it is a 'real' representation of who Michael is. Being neither significant enough nor Italian enough to have ever been granted one-on-one access, I've had nothing to do with him outside of press conferences and group interviews. Yet even though Kehm gives us Michael's life through the 'approved' lens, I still feel that this book helped me understand him a little.

Maybe his familiarity with Kehm encouraged him to open up a little more than usual (or at least more than he usually does in English; I've no idea what he is like in Italian or German), but whatever the reason, it was enough to convince me that much of the initial scepticism I had when it first arrived in the post was unfounded. And besides, if you get sick of the words, you can always laugh at the photos of him in a cowboy hat.

Part of my brief when I was asked to write a retrospective of Michael Schumacher books was that I look at the bad as well as the good. I'm sorry to have to do this, then, as there are times that I feel it is all I do, but I have to give the gong to Christopher Hilton.

I can't speak for the books he wrote about Schumacher in the Benetton era (they came out before I was reviewing F1 books, and I didn't buy them), but 2000's 'Michael Schumacher: The Ferrari Years' is the most forgettable of the stack. It's just Hilton at his most tedious: lap-by-lap, race-by-race, boring press release quote after boring press release quote, and reading like it was thrown together over a long weekend. I'm saving my copy in case I ever need to prop up a table leg.

He followed it up with 'Michael Schumacher: The Greatest Of All?' in 2002, which was largely more of the same, although this was livened up a bit with occasional scraps of good interview material. But I have not felt the urge to pick it up since I finished the original review four years ago.

And I cannot go without mentioning Jane Nottage's 'Ferrari: The Passion and the Pain' (1998) - a truly dreadful book to which I nonetheless owe my entire journalism career. That's a story for another time though, and is certainly no reason to pay for this sappy, hagiographic account of the 1998 season.

There's one final observation I'd like to make before signing off. This is just a sample of the many books that have attempted to document Schumacher's long and incredible career, but the one common thing they share is that they have all tried to tell the story while it was being played out.

As such, they can really only be seen as evaluations of his career at certain points, rather than exhaustive accounts. But in just a few short weeks, Michael will get out of the car for the last time, and put the final full stop on an amazing tale.

And a few months later, when the dust has settled, we will be able to have our first opportunity to look back at his career with all the 20/20 vision that hindsight brings, and our first chance to sense exactly how history will judge him. The definitive Michael Schumacher book is still waiting to be written.

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- The Autosport.com Team

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