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My Mother the Car

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The car has long held a special place in the American imagination. This looks like a fun book, Engines of Change, in which,


Mr. Ingrassia, the deputy editor in chief of Reuters, is a former Detroit bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal (and the brother of Lawrence Ingrassia, the business editor of The New York Times). In this book he draws upon his expertise covering the car business to give us a highly informed but breezy narrative history of the vehicles that have shaped and reflected American culture.
Along the way he also gives us some sharp snapshots of the engineers, businessmen and ad people who helped design and promote these automobiles, men like Harley Earl, who led General Motors’ design department for three decades, “from the Jazz Age to the Space Age,” and John DeLorean, the fast-living engineer and executive behind Pontiac’s GTO, “the meanest street-legal car in America,” and behind his own company’s DMC-12, the stainless-steel roadster with gull-wing doors better known as the magic time machine in “Back to the Future.
In the mid-60s the Corvair pictured above underwent a major make over, with new "sexy" lines, I suppose to compete with the Corvette and Mustang.

Comments

  1. JAbelJune 26, 2012 at 7:55 AM

    Always liked the looks of the late model corvairs.A buddy has a restored 65 corvair monza convertible in Lilac.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JAbelJune 26, 2012 at 8:03 AM

    One that caught my eye recently was American Canopy:The role of trees in the shaping of a nation.Forget the author Eric something? but it looks pretty good.

    ReplyDelete
  3. James FergusonJune 27, 2012 at 10:13 AM

    The Corvair was a nice car, but it also served as the launching pad for Ralph Nader, which Ingrassia apparently covers in this book.

    ReplyDelete

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