Transportation Books

Although this book appears to be biographical fiction for kids, the fiction outweighs the history so heavily that I see very little value in it as a history teaching tool. As a story, the plot is moral and enjoyable enough (if a bit trite) and seemed appropriate for a 2nd or 3rd grader just getting into longer chapter books. If you are hoping to learn a lot about the real Wright brothers, though, look elsewhere.

This is a book back in history. The biography of two males come to me for the coolest time for kids! So, if you are a young child, you may like to read a biography two males. Gruateened you will love it!!

This book is really good. I like the way the author provides information about Orville and Wilbur individually, instead of just lumping them together as "the Wright brothers." I also liked reading about their childhood, how they got interested in flying, and how they developed their airplane.

Read about the life of those amazing inventors, Wilbur and Oriville Wright, as they learn explore, and create a flying machine!

if looks could kill you'd be dead after looking at this book. the photo's are superior to most. I 'm tired of the same old shots of bikes. Worse there is NOTHING worse then a bike with a woman in a bikini on it. Don't get me wrong I love women but the harley davidson can sell itself without the porn. this book doesn't offer a lot of new theories but it's still rather interesting. I think that after you read this book it would make a fine collection to your coffee table.

Although this book has many elements, its core is the Harley-Davidson as a design. The photographs are mostly of 50 different models, focused on the motorcycle alone, done with remarkable lighting to create exquisite detail and color. You will feel like you are visiting a museum of mint Harleys as you "stroll" from page to page while sitting comfortably in your favorite chair. The book is strengthened by some classic Harley photos that you have seen before, such as from Easy Rider. There is also a good overview of the development of the company, key technologies, and a timeline of when different bikes were introduced. For those who don't know about Harleys, you also have a glossary to help you interpret, and a list of contacts to help you get even more information.

"People remember their first Harley-Davidson." As Hugo Wilson points out, that's because "Harleys look different, sound different and certainly ride different to other motorcycles." One of the strengths of the book is that it provides many helpful details about the bases of those differences. I could literally "hear" a Harley every time I looked at one of the images. And now I know why they sound that way. You will, too, when you read this exciting book.

"Their extraordinary appeal makes small boys dream and grown men save." Harley-Davidsons clearly draw on our sense of adventure, our desire for freedom, and our need to be different. Mothers, if you don't want your children to grow up to be bikers, keep this book and all Harleys away! The lure of the open road will be irresistible after enjoying this volume.

I am not an expert on motorcycles but have spent many happy hours on them. I could feel the thundering power in my legs as I looked at the Harley in Terminator II, the 74FLHB Electra Glide in blue from 1965, the FLHS Electra Glide from 1988, the FLSTF Fat Boy from 1999, and especially the Buell X1 Lightning from 1999.

To me the best page was 184 where there is a cutaway of the famous V-twin engine, along with a good description of each element. This is the heart of what makes a Harley a Harley, and I was glad to learn more about this wonderful design.

After you have finished enjoying this book and taken a ride on your Harley to celebrate (don't have one yet? . . . well, start dreaming and saving . . .), I suggest that you think about other ways you can enjoy your spirit of adventure and desire for the open road. Riding a Harley doesn't get you all the exercise you could use. Are there any hiking trails that you could ride your Harley to? In that way, you could have a double adventure. Plus, you can have even more enjoyment with your family and friends while you hike. If you haven't hiked the Grand Canyon yet down to the Colorado River, that would make a great ride/hike combination. Just do it! -- (but do plan ahead, you'll enjoy it more if you do).

Be different and better!

Great read, inspiring inside and out. If you read for pleasure you will also enjoy a Harley novel "The Second Coming Of Age" by: Curtiss de Vedrine

This really is a beautiful book. Lots of great pictures and the explanations to back them up. If you want a good introduction to learning the world of Harley, this is a great place to start.

Wonderful pictures and great engine exploration photos. Well done!

Our Grandson loves "Cars"....the other books purchased were great, this one with the stickers fell apart quickly. Stickers did not "restick" were not "reusable" for more than once....and were difficult to get off to begin with. I would not recommend this product.

The quality of the book itself is great - sturdy, thick, laminated pages with high quality graphics and color. The stickers are reusable. However, while they are thicker than just a regular sticker, they are made of paper and still tear if pulled off at the wrong angle.

My 3.5 year old son loves looking through the book and matching up the stickers with the various shapes on the pages, but I either have to peel off the sticker myself and hand it to him, or make sure he is pulling it off at the correct angle so it doesn't rip. We've already torn two in half and I had to fix them with scotch tape.

It's too bad the stickers aren't made of 'colorform' type of vinyl that wouldn't be as fragile as paper ones.

But this one was fairly well done. Nice amount of stickers, many pages to use them creatively to tell stories.

This is a great book, the stickers ARE reusable, the book is sturdy, high quality. The book has great scenes for stickers to be applied, blank pages with suggestions on different ways to play, and pages for matching (ie: wheels to cars) included. My 2 1/2 year old grandson spends an hour with it, and the price is right!

This dictionary has everything you need in it. Im in A&P School and I use it every day. And other students borrow it on a regulay basis. It keeps me from running to the computer every time I need to understand something.

This was a required book for my A&P program. We haven't used it a ton but it has definitely come in handy from time to time. Some of the definitions are circular -- two definitions each referring to the other -- but for the most part they are clear and concise, quite helpful.

My A&P instructor commonly touts this dictionary and highly recommends it. I haven't purchased one yet, but he is certainly more qualified then I am to recommend it.

Although this dictionary is big, there are a significant number of terms I was unable to find that are important to instrument/commercial pilots - visual descent point (VDP), for example.

Seems to be more engineering/maintenance oriented because those types of terms are exhaustively covered.

I am an entry-level engineer in an aerospace company. I found that this dictionary is useful for understanding some of the terms that are used.

Was looking for this little book and knew Amazon would have it. As always, pleased with the product and the service.

My 2.5-year-old loves all these John Deere books. They're not terribly literary -- they don't rhyme or use meter and they're not exactly deep -- but they are solid entertainment for small children who love construction and farming vehicles. The characters are cute and the content is appropriate for preschoolers. This one tells a story of how the contruction vehicles get together to build a fancy ballpark for the neighborhood kids. It's not going to win any awards, but it is going to provide a lot of children with some good clean fun.

As a side bonus, this book appears to have planted in my son the seed of an interest in baseball. :)

If it's about machines, my son loves the book. We've read this book several times. It's a cute story and teaches kids about machines. Just plain fun.

Motorbooks tends to put out some pretty skimpy titles. Lots of flash and little substance is often the case. This book seems to be an exception. As a total non-artist this book really helped me develop some skills in the area of automotive art.

A lot of good information without a lot of opinion. Nice drawings for you to use for reference and motivation. Good coverage of the different types of media.

I'd buy it again.

I find it that this book covers most of aspects you need to know to draw cars "properly". I recommend this book for anyone wishing to learn or hone their skills on car drawings, because it is quite difficult to understand such thing for some people like me :D

My 11 y/o son is into drawing and into cars, so naturaly he started drawing cars, but he needed some help. I for one don't know what to do (not an artist), so I got this book for him, and so far the drawings he brings me are soooo much better. They are as good as the ones in the book, but it sure did give him a few pointers here and there. He loves looking at the tips, and hints in the book. All in all it made a difference to his drawings.

The books delivered were brand new. No problrms with the binding or the pages.

This wasn't so great at how to draw cars, but there is a lot of good stuff on how to render them realistically, which is why i bought it.

Excellent corporate history of Ford Motor Company, and unavoidably, a biography of Henry Ford, who for the first 45 years of the company was Ford Motor Company.

The chaotic early years of the automotive industry are captured in the two failed car companies Ford left behind, including the Henry Ford Company which was taken over by Henry Leland and renamed Cadillac (the first Cadillac was a Ford design!), and in the thought processes of Henry Ford thinking and planning for a million cars per year while other car makers were building a thousand cars per year.

Ford loses a little of his luster in this book, as we learn that he was rabidly anti-Semitic, belittled his son Edsel even as he made him president of the company, and had very little to do with engineering and production of the cars that carried his name around the world.

But we also learn that his genius lay in constantly pushing for improving processes and reducing cost and thus price so that the automobile could become affordable to Everyman--a process that shaped the 20th century and reshaped history. We learn that black was the only color option for the Model T because the black paint dried faster and thus enabled shorter production time, and that while the Model T was produced almost unchanged for 20 years, the processes that produced the Model T changed almost literally every single day (according to the book, every day of production at least one machine on the Model T production line was added or modified).

Overall well-done social and technical history that explains and frames Ford in context, and doesn't detract from the pride of ownership of Ford products.

Wheels for the World is a captivating look at the Ford Motor Company from its earliest conception to the present day. Douglas Brinkley, being granted unrivalled access to Ford's archives, takes the reader back to the beginning of Henry Ford's youth onwards to the incorporation of the Ford Motor Company to today. The richness and detail Brinkley provides is what sets this apart from other historical biographical works. And in a sense, this is what the book is, a biographical look at Henry Ford and his family with a historical look at the company. Brinkley brings to life so many different characters that brought profound changes to Ford that have long since been forgotten today. People such as Alex Malcomson (who provided the finances in the creation of the final iteration of Ford), James Couzens (the financial and administrative wizard in the early days who created a corporate structure from scratch), and many others are all covered in-depth in this book as well as the main players such as Sorensen and Iacocca. He also covers different aspects of Ford such as the creation of Ford's Aviation Department and the positive relationship he had with African-Americans. Neither does Brinkley whitewash the controversies Henry Ford nor the Ford Company stirred in their day (from anti-Semitism to the Pinto debacle). However, there are a few issues with this book. Although overall very detailed and encompassing, after the passing of Henry Ford, the book begins to accelerate through the companies' history. This is especially profound after the retirement of Henry Ford II where Brinkley rushes through 2 decades until he reaches the inauguration of William Clay Ford Jr. and then proceeds to faun over him as if he were a great saviour (which even today we still don't know). Although not an extreme problem, it does unfortunately not tie in as well with the rest of the books fascinating details and perspectives. One feels that Brinkley was growing tired of writing (and it is quite the read at 764 pages) and wanted to speed things up a little so he could wrap up sooner. All told though, this nagging detail is not enough to negatively affect Brinkley's work. Wonderfully written and full of details, Brinkley's book may literally be one of the last books you may ever need to read on Henry Ford and his company.

Wheels for the World by Douglas Brinkley is a lengthy, but well written book that details the Ford Motor Company's epic history and many accomplishments. Brinkley offers the reader plenty of information on Henry Ford, the pioneer of mass produced auto manufacturing. He details everything from Ford's instabilities and contradicting behavior to his impeccable business savvy. A major downfall for Wheels for the World is Brinkley's inability to make clean transitions from one idea to the next. The reader gets attached to one idea, and the next thing you know Brinkley has begun an entirely new concept. But, in the end I believe the author did a great job of capturing the struggles and successes of the Ford Motor Company, while also taking us through an interesting journey into the life of an extremely intelligent man in our nation's history. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the nation and the auto-making industry.

Last year, I read a book about Henry Ford and his anti-Semitism. At that time, I had a very narrow view about the man - I wish now that I had read this book, Douglas Brinkley's study of Ford and his company, before I had read that one.

Brinkley's mammoth volume on this one man and the company he created is a tremendous addition to American business history. Brinkely gives us a comprehensive study (about half of the book) of Henry Ford the man and how he created the Ford Motor Company. This segment of the book really gave me a new respect for the man as an innovator and an idealist, though his engineering skills were apparently lacking (at one point Brinkley tells his audience that Ford couldn't even read a blueprint). Brinkley intertwines the story of Henry's son Edsel, who was given the unenviable task of running Ford Motor while Henry was still alive and wouldn't release control over some of the day-to-day operations.

After seeing Edsel die an untimely death, we see Ford Motor transition to Henry II. This is the first time that Henry Sr. relinquishes some control, and we see what the company can do (and does) during this period. Brinkley vividly tells the story of Henry II and his interactions with the labor movement in conjunction with operations at Ford Motor.

Towards the end of the book, we see the post Henry II era. We see a couple of different CEO's, including Donald Peterson, who seemed to help the company, and Jac Nasser, who probably isn't missed much by the Ford family - his reign saw the depletion of massive cash reserves from the corporation. At the conclusion of the book, Brinkley shows us the path that the company is taking today under the leadership of Bill Ford, Jr.

I believe that Brinkley has given us a wonderful book here - telling us the story not just of a man or a company, but a combination of so many facets of American history. What made Henry Ford tick? Why did he create Ford Motor Company? What did he do to make it survive? How did Ford Motor Company impact Michigan and America as a whole? All of these questions, and so many more, are answered in this splendid book. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a strong understanding of how one man and the business he built can have such a tremendous impact on America and the rest of the world.

Douglas Brinkley has convinced me that you can at once be sponsored by a corporation to do its history AND not fawn over the organization AND write readably.

Someone else here descreibed the book as an "endurance test." I would not agree...I thought the book, though long, was well-organized, well-paced and easy to maintain reader interest.

Henry Ford I is the centerpiece, all right, but I especially enjoyed Brinkley's insights into the much more private, even reticent, Edsel Ford. Edsel really saved the company during the late 20s and then the depression, but is largely forgotten for his role. Henry's crazed desire for control caused him to embarass and berate his only son at every opportunity. Edsel died relatively young; in fact, Henry outlived him.

What is it we want out of life? Of we want our lives to make a difference, then Henry was an unqualified success. Self promotion aside, Henry changed the whole world more than any other single figure of the twentieth century - and did so despite glaring personal inadequacies and near-fatal quirks. When he was wrong, he was incredibly adamantly and brutally wrong.

"Never complain, never explain." Henry I didn't say it, but his grandson Henry II did - and Henry II led the company through its time of turnaround, unprecedented growth and earnings in the 1980s. A great book!

The manual was in very good condition and arrived in a timely manner. The manual is not quite as informative and detailed as I was hoping but still is a very helpful reference in repairing various aspects of my Mazda B3000 truck.

Since the delivery from Amazon, everything looking well, but I don't received the book yet. I believe the delay could be from mail services here, but I can find my package. Could you help me?

This manual is ok for minor repairs but lacks good detail information on anything major. Trying to locate components is frustrating due to the lack of good photos or illustrations. Manual is a near carbon copy of the Chilton's book - don't waste your money on both.

Good product, in excellent shape. There would be some more imformation to be written in that book; it just so happens that I needed to locate the heater's resitance in a 1997 Mazda b2300 and they just don't say no nutinn about this specific part. The person who sent me the book does not have anything to do with that of course. The book was very clean and in excellent order when arrived at my home.

I always buy both the Chilton and Haynes repair manuals to get two different perspectives. I bought both this time, and was surprised when the content was exactly the same. Same Table of Contents, same pictures, chapter numbers, etc. Are they kidding?

Did these companies merge or something?