Frank Coffey

The text portion of this book was good. The illustrations in this book were also good. I am not sure that the people choosing where to place the images actually read the chapters they were illustrating, because the images and the text didn't always support each other very well, but taken seperately, they were both good. After the chapter covering the 1970's, the images became steadily worse, as if there are no attractive photos of 1980's and 1990's cars, and for some reason the unflattering images of these more recent cars tended to be 2-page full-color spreads, but I suspect most people would have stopped reading long before these last chapters.

Why? Because the layout of this book was awful. I understand needing to hyphenate a few words across page breaks, but this seemed the rule, not the exception, and often these hyphenations would occur not just across a page turn, but across a whole 4-8pg section of photos. Even where words weren't hyphenated, sentences would just break off half-way through for these unhelpful photo interludes. Considering the size of the book and the many images, and the fact that it is a 'companion' book to a PBS show, I am sure that the person/people responsible for creating this book did not expect anyone to actually read it. But, the text was good, well written and well researched, and provided an interesting perspective on many aspects of American automobile history. I had not known much about the dark side of the Ford Motor Company, and found this book particularly interesting for its introductory survey of the human rights and labor rights side of Ford history.

So, yes I think this is a good book, well worth reading. But I wish the people designing the page layouts had tried reading the text before they had finalized this choppy presentation of an otherwise good history book.… (more)