Customer Reviews

Great American Dream Machines

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Great book. The text is informative, witty and quick paced. The photography is outstanding. No reprints of old photos. The author/photographer is obviously a great photgrapher who happens to love American Cars. Unlike the majority of car books where someone has a camera, it is high noon and they take a picture This book has set a standard which leaves all the other car books in its dust.

A celebration of the great American cars of the late 1940's through the early 1970's. In addition to all the iron turned out by Detroit there are a few cars that were improved upon by their owners. We are talking Kustoms, the forgotten art of the 50's. The livley anecdotal text is accompamnied by the best car photography today. Many of the cars featured are former participants of the 1950's and 1960's submarine races.

My first and second cars were a 1961 Rambler and a 1967 Chevy respectively. The cars owned by my friend Ron were a 1951Chevy and a 1964 Chevy. Gary owned a 1968 Charger and Tom a 1965 Barracuda. My brother's first car was a 1965 Ford and then a late sixties Mustang. My all-time favorite car is the Z-28 Camaro of the late sixties. When I was growing up, my elderly neighbor owned a pristine 1956 Chevy.
While not all of those cars are illustrated in this book, there are enough photos of similar cars to bring back very fond memories of times past. Ron was a mechanic and I often helped him and Tom work on cars. We took them apart and put them back together, so I have seen the complete insides of some of these vehicles. There was nothing like getting behind the wheel of my '67 Chevy with a powerful V-8 engine, kicking the gas pedal to the floor and feeling the physical effect of being pushed back into the seat. It gave you a particular feeling of power that nothing else can give you. While I always drove the speed limit, there was no law regarding the time you had to spend getting to that speed.
While there is a lengthy caption explaining each car pictured, I did not read all of them. Even though the captions are complete, in most cases I was too busy looking at the pictures and enjoying the memories to worry about reading.