“Zora Arkus-Duntov: The Legend Behind Corvette”, by Jerry Burton

 

428 pages, Robert Bentley, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0837608587

Isn’t America a great country? This is not a rhetorical question, but one that needs to be asked frequently as with all of the negativity heaped upon this country can cause one to forget what is so great about us. Like how one Zora Arkus-Duntov, the Belgian-born Russian engineer whose work on the Chevrolet Corvette earned him the nickname “The Father of the Corvette” (not inventor; that would be Harley Earl). Duntov was born Zachary Arkus on Christmas Day in 1909 to Yakov “Jacques” Arkus (a mining engineer) and Rachel Kogan (a medical student), both Russian-born Jews who returned home when the Russian Revolution was in full swing, with Rachel even becoming an official in the new, Bolshevik government. When Duntov’s parents divorced, Zora and his younger brother, Yura, took on the hyphenated last name of Arkus-Duntov, out of respect to their mother’s new husband, Josef Duntov, an electrical engineer (although, even after the divorce, Jacques continued to live with the family. Weird). Inspired first by Auto Union and then by Mercedes-Benz racing, Zora became involved in road racing before earning a degree in mechanical engineering at Berlin’s University of Charlottenburg. Zora and his new wife ultimately arrived in Michigan where he joined GM as a development engineer.

Zora Arkus-Duntov: The Legend Behind Corvette by Jerry Burton tells the story of how this gifted immigrant-engineer, brought up by Red parents no less, became the guiding force behind the legendary American sports car and, along the way, became an American legend himself. We learn all about Zora in this detailed yet accessible story of a man who became one of the automotive engineering giants of the 20^th Century (even if you’ve never heard of him; I hadn’t). Burton, editor of Corvette Quarterly, has worked with many of Zora’s friends and colleagues (as well as his widow Elfi, God Bless her) to write the definitive biography of Zora Arkus-Duntov. Corvette enthusiasts know Zora as the guy who snatched Corvette from the jaws of death in the early 1950s, then improved its engineering, performance and image to such an extent that it went from a product Chevrolet dealers couldn’t give away to the most successful high-performance sports car on earth: The Great American Sports Car. A good part of how Corvette became one of the rare automobiles to attain American Icon status is attributable directly to Zora’s vision, personality and hard work.

Only in America. Through painstaking research and an affable style, Burton weaves all of the colorful aspects of Zora’s life into a highly-captivating story. The book is decidedly non-technical (one of its major strong points, if you ask me, and I know you did) with each chapter almost a short-story unto itself, encompassing a particular period or aspect of Zora’s fascinating life. But the book is remarkably unbiased and never degenerates into hero-worship, as Burton covers his subject’s strengths and weaknesses in an unadulterated fashion. Zora was a wonderfully talented and visionary engineer who was all too-human: he cheated on his wife, partied too much, drove too fast and pissed-off half the executives at GM, right up to the CEO. But he loved the Corvette, worked hard to make it better and strived to promote it, not only to the public, but also to the company that was making it because, in the car’s early years, GM didn’t know what to do with Corvettes and often didn’t want them at all, if you can believe that. Burton’s smooth writing style and easy reading make this biography an outstanding entertainment as well as an excellent work of biography.