Customer Reviews

Top Dead Center 2: Racing and Wrenching with Cycle World's Kevin Cameron

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Reading this latest offering from Kevin Cameron reminds me what I dont know about motorcycles. Quite a lot really. I have Kevin's earlier book and this one is just as good, which means its great. Kevin's explanation of how things work is exact yet easy to read and understand. Reading Kevin is one thing, talking to him must be amazing. Perhaps Kevin's next project should be in a visual format. I'd love to watch him dismantling an old Grand Prix bike while explaining what everything does, how and why. My only issue with the book is , its not long enough and the paper is cheap. In spite of this you should still buy it.

TDC2 is a new, four-part collection of Cameron's CYCLE WORLD columns back to 1974: `Memorable Machines,' `Timeless Technology,' Gearhead Geniuses' and `Racing Revealed.' The first ~200 pages cover motorcycle technology, back to the first motorized bicycles. The last 100 recount men, memorable moments and important places.

Enthusiasts know that building, fettling, riding and racing motorcycles is not enough. To appreciate our sport, we want to know how bikes work, in detail--engines, transmissions, frames, brakes, suspension, tires. We'd like to understand the designs, materials and processes that make winners, on track and in the showroom. We hanker for insights that will help us, as mechanics and riders, to go faster, to keep us out of trouble, to win as racers and to report as motojournalists. We'd like to know more about the sport's great, successful role models.

Enter Kevin Cameron, motorcycle polymath. Over the years he has mastered the essence and core values of motorcycling, emphasizing racing, and put it on paper for us. Through his writings we can, in effect, take in and learn essentially everything we need to know about the men and the machines. He has distilled a lifetime's learning into words of wisdom.

Despite his writing skill, the author had to use nothing but words, where drawings, diagrams or detailed photos would have supplemented and clarified the text but were not available to accompany the original writings (the book's photos are mostly inconsequential). This puts the onus of understanding on readers, to comprehend dense technical detail down to fundamental physics and chemistry. Chassis and suspension take four chapters/40 pages, tires three segments/28 pages, one third of the book. So: re-read for comprehension--tough going, but worth the effort.

For many readers, the personal snapshots of Morbidelli, Buell, Kanemoto, Honda and Czysz may be more accessible. Richly anecdotal, these five chapters provide rare insights into a few of the great men who changed motorcycling and racing, at almost superhuman levels of effort and commitment.

Cameron's final reminiscences are sheer delight. They show the author as acutely observant, exercising all his senses and appetites to live more fully, assimilating and expressing the realities of foreign travel, food and wine, architecture and ambience, men and their motivations, providing first-hand, historical detail on Doug Chandler, Gary Nixon, John Kocinski and Ago that greatly enlarges our knowledge of these great racers. Try this chapter opening, a personal remembrance of a long-gone Yamaha TD1: "Innocent events sometimes punch through time into the past, leaving us fascinated, surrounding us with the vapors of forgotten feelings." Poetry, matching the man's analytical mind.

A bigger, epochal motorcycle book, fully illustrated, lurks behind the writings and books Kevin Cameron has given us. For now, we must take him in bites, but what tasty and tasteful bites! TDC2, essential reading, enhances his oeuvre and has us hungering for more.

This is the book that I had hoped TDC1 would have been. I'm more interested in the machinery of racing than in the human aspects. I hope Mr.Cameron isn't finished writing.

In his first book, Kevin gave long winded stories about years past, which were indeed a pleasure to read, but I was hoping for his in depth, technical expertise written in terms a layman can understand, just like his columns on Cycle World. Well, that is just what we get in TDC 2. It's not a straight collection of columns, some are stories that were I'm sure published elsewhere, but were page-turner interesting. In this book he gets into the technical aspects of every aspect of a motorcycle, just what he is now known for. He covers the technology as it develops over the decades, talking about the trial and error approach that was often taken. His analysis and words are simply sublime. In short, Kevin at his best. I recommend owning both books, but if money is an issue, skip the first one, get the second one, and save up for a hopefully soon forthcoming third.

This is as good as it gets if you are into the engineering side of motorcycling. I suspect this is one of those rare books that I will read over and over again. Kevin clearly explains phenomena better than anyone I have ever read. Five Stars!

Kevin cameron has a unique ability to write about the subject i love, with the depth and passion of good literature.. I can recommend it to anyone interested in history, motorcycles, technical detail and an easy, hard to put down read

I always learn much from everything Kevin writes and this book is one of the best for gaining more comprehension of both mechanical nuance as well as the racing scene and ongoing march of technology. I hope he continues writing and publishing.