The Best of Chuck Klein: How Guns, Hot Rods, Police Ethics and Sacred Rights Shape America

The Best of Chuck Klein... ... Is very good indeed His nostalgic tales of hot-rodding and high-schooling in the 50s are like riding in a cherry 1957 Corvette. Imagine cruising through your favorite old haunts and nothing has changed. There s the patch of rubber you laid last weekend with your new Goodyears. The radio is playing all your favorite songs by the Everly Brothers and the Four Tops. That s it a four-barrel, fuel injected time machine. You can almost smell the high-octane fuel, burning rubber and Brylcreem. That s Chuck Klein s writing. He has the gift to take you back to the bleachers of your teen years. But then there is the Chuck Klein that has flashing gumballs on the roof, a wailing siren and a police-pursuit big block V-8. The same guy who evaded the cops while street racing, eventually became one and saw the same picture from the other side of the frame. What s it like for a cop to roll in the dirt, trying to arrest a bigger, stronger man, lose his gun, get shot and shoot back? Klein tells us in gripping, gritty detail There s another Chuck Klein in an unmarked car a private detective. And there s the Chuck Klein today, who looks a lot like the old hot-rodder and drives a very nice old El Camino because anything new off the assembly line would be missing an important part soul But Chuck Klein is not a Corvette or a cop car. He s a man. By the old-school definition. A guy who can do things. Build a car. Race it. Fix it when it breaks. Take a wild and reckless risk and laugh about it later. Wear a gun. Handle it properly and use it if he has to. He has strong opinions about the way the world should work, based on experience and hard-earned knowledge, not flimsy feelings. All this makes him stand out in a traffic jam of men who are as about as exciting as the cars they drive that look like shiny new appliances with random numbers and letters on the side where it used to say Bel Air, Thunderbird or Fury There are still plenty of men like that around. But their kind is endangered, like the old pre-muscle cars they used to drive and still love. And very few among that few can tell the story. Chuck Klein can write. He can make a story sing like tires on a wet highway. He can take you around a corner on two wheels, or just cruise slowly through a Big Boy parking lot, circa 1957 Take a ride with him. You won t be sorry. from the Foreword, by Peter Bronson, former Cincinnati Enquirer columnist, now contributing editor for Cincy Magazine. March, 2013