Customer Reviews

Blackpool's trams "as popular as the tower"

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Higgs, a numismatist with a special interest in the medieval Levant, gets a tip about an undervalued amateur collection to be auctioned at an estate sale in the popular English resort town of Blackpool. What he finds is a collection of faked Roman scrap, but by then it's too late, he's already fallen in love with (and on) the famous Trams of Blackpool. What follows is a delightfully (some might call it overly) detailed account of the sights, sounds, and smells one will encounter along each of the routes; what makes the book really special (aside from Higgs' signature musclebound, tight-trousered prose) is the appendix, in which a history of the mechanical evolution of the town's tram corps is transformed into what amounts to a history of the evolution of our own human (oh, all too) souls. Worth every cent of the out-of-print search fee.