Roy Bacon

Having just read the “ultimate” history of Mercedes-Benz, I can definitely say that the odds are stacking up in its favour… This book is a short introduction to the Mercedes-Benz marque, but where it aimed for brevity and conciseness, it ended up sounding like a poorly compiled facts list with absolutely no soul. The author was clearly going for clarity and organization when he planned the book, but each chapter (covering approximately a decade of history) wound up lacking a lot of crucial information as by the second chapter he was essentially just listing new makes and models of the vehicles. There’s a time and a place for this kind of narrative, but the book would have been served better if he had done away with any attempt at a “narrative” and simply stuck to providing concise captions for a chronological set of images. The photos themselves are the only redeeming feature of the book, since he chose some excellent historical examples that I haven’t seen elsewhere and even those illustrating the make/model listings were often images from the time period of the cars’ origin. Clearly the author has a knack for detail and for sourcing historically interesting photographs, so this book would have been a lot more enjoyable if he had fully engaged with that simpler style.… (more)