Customer Reviews

Vintage Car Wrecks

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a really great book for anyone with an interest in cars from the 50's to the 70's. The descriptions of the automobile wrecks are both informative and interesting, and the collection of pictures is truley amazing. The book is sectioned into groups of pictures with captions that describe the sceen and the automobile, making for a really great bathroom reader as you can work through just a few pages at a time. But if you enjoy the book as much as I have you'll probably have trouble putting it down.

Wow, these babies got crunched worse than I would have ever imagined these 1930's-70's thick steel cars could take. The author, Rusty Herlocher, gives readers a bonus by IDENTIFYING the years, makes, and models. He even points out trivialities that the average reader might miss and at times throws in some humor occasionally. For example; "This 1965 Biscayne demonstrates that a big tree will not give an inch to a car." I would recommend this book because of the excellent quality photos of a wide variety of automobiles and the proof of what can happen when you are at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I found this book to be very toughtful. Respect was given to the accidednts, I'm sure that people were hurt and even worse in some of these, but maybe it is a good thing to remind people what can happen if they are not careful drivers. I found it to be chilling at times, but that is life, everything can not be sugar coated, and car accidents can be deadly, no matter how badly some people would like to think differently. If this book would make just one kid think twice about driving after drinking it would be worth the work this author did. Some of the photos were funny, and the captions were light hearted. I'm a car nut so I liked the photos.

Plenty of pictures of crashed cars but the reproduction of the pictures leaves something to be desired. The captions provide interesting information in a corny style, but I often wondered how he knows these things. Some information could only be had by reading the police reports of the accidents or seeing the actual cars up close.

I'm an old car nut, and gave this book 2 stars just for the impressive collection of photos. However, I was shocked by the lack of human compassion shown by the "author" in his captions for these pictures. This book is picture after picture of the aftermath of human injury, suffering, and death, and all this guy can say are things like "This Buick driver left his car in a dandy position for a lube job!" He does have two paragraphs in the Foreward stating that most auto injuries are the result of alcohol. True enough, but this book is just an attempt to make some money by cracking lame jokes at mistakes that obviously resulted in major injury and suffering. Just because it happened 40 or 50 years ago doesn't reduce that. What's next from this guy? "World's Best Autopsy Jokes?" I'm glad I only read this book in the store. No way would I want to contribute to this juvenile callousness. I'm a red blooded Republican with a strong stomach, not some whiny liberal, but this kind of insensitivity crosses all boundaries.