Ruesch, Hans 1913-2007

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born May 17, 1913, in Naples, Italy; died of cancer, August 27, 2007, in Lugano, Switzerland. Race car driver, novelist, and author. Ruesch had successful careers in two very different fields. He was a race car driver in Europe in the glamorous heyday of the Grand Prix, reportedly competing in more than a hundred races in the 1930s and winning nearly thirty of them. At the end of his racing career Ruesch moved to the United States and commenced a new career as a magazine writer. When he returned to Europe in 1950, he began writing travel guides and other nonfiction, but mostly he wrote novels. Ruesch's 1950 novel Top of the World, the story of an Eskimo family, was filmed as The Savage Innocents, starring Anthony Quinn. South of the Heart: A Novel of Arabia (1951) was set at the opposite end of the climate scale. His 1953 novel The Racer was eventually made into a film starring Kirk Douglas. Ruesch wrote several novels before turning to nonfiction. Imperatrice nuda: La scienza medica attuale sotto accusa (1976), originally translated as Naked Empress; or, The Great Medical Fraud in 1982, then revised in 1983 and published as Slaughter of the Innocent, represented his plea for an end to the use of animals as medical test subjects and, according to some sources, acted as a catalyst for the emerging animal welfare movement.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, September 3, 2007, p. A15.