Just in time for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the third in the action-packed motion picture series powered by pure adrenaline and racing prowess, this book offers a close-up, detailed look at the cars that make these movies soar. An in-depth guide to all the cars in all three films, The Fast and the Furious: The Official Car Guide: All the Cars, All the Movies spotlights each vehicle in its turn, with full specs, photos on and off the set, descriptions of the stunts performed, insights into how each car was built and modified for filming, and analysis of its role in the movie. Author Kris Palmer’s interviews with directors and stunt coordinators complete this full-color behind-the-scenes picture of the hottest cars on the big screen. With a foreword by director Justin Lin.
As a child, Kris Palmer was given by his parents to the Peking Opera, where he learned acting, acrobatics and kung fu. --Wait, that was Jackie Chan. Kris Palmer was raised in the hilly horse country giving way to housing developments in Chester County, PA. There, he rode bikes and go-karts and learned the address of every cool car on every road he traveled, from the Hurst pistol-grip '69 Charger R/T in the "circle" at the end of his block, to the wooden-spoked-wheeled brass-era car under a 48-star American flag in a shed adjoining a colonial-era house at the bottom of the hill, to a Lotus Super 7 in a barn owned by a classmate's family.
After high school, his parents were kind enough to pay for college, so long as he studied engineering or medicine. He could become a doctor, too, if he wanted. Oops, that was already one of the choices. Being a doc sounded fine, but there's some hurdles to medical school, including The Science of Very Small Things. It's taught in Biology and Chemistry courses, and appears on glass slides and diagrams of things like the sodium cycle and in concepts using number-letter phrases like 1s1, 2s2, 2p6. You have to be very smart and have a Herculean tolerance to boredom to gut through these courses and get on to medical school, where you study actual stuff about treating human beings. Although enrolled in a Biology program at Boston University, Kris preferred loading a duffel bag with climbing rope and taking the "T" with a friend to the Mystic-Tobin bridge, scrambling to the top where those knee-high red lights wink out at the city and then rappelling down.
So Kris transferred to a Communications program at UW-Madison to study writing, TV and film and now we were cooking with natural-wood charcoal. No stultifyingly small things here. His years at Madison have never been surpassed. They led in their circuitous, luck-guided way to his writing about cars for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, publishing several books, including Dream Garages, Survivor: The Unrestored Collector Car, and Survivor Motorcycle, and editing over 100 more works for Motorbooks and other publishers. The UW years also influenced him to move to Minneapolis, which seemed like "Madison-plus."
In Minneapolis, Kris practices law with his wife of 15 years, drives, studies and drools over antique, classic and sports cars, pens articles for newspapers and magazines, writes books, and rides and wrenches on his '83 Honda CB1100F.
Because of his iron will, he is able to avoid purchasing virtually every amazing car or bike he can't afford.
