Tricky's Book of the Month

[trickyrix]

I just got my hands on what promises to be a fascinating book. It's called Six Men Who Built The Modern Auto Industry, by Richard Johnson. You might think it consists of individual biographies of the six men, but that's not the case. It details how the lives/careers of these six became intertwined to create today's automotive landscape. As Dana Larson would say... "Pretty impressive stuff, for sure."

Here are The Six (in no particular order):
Henry Ford II - greenlit the GT40 program after Old Man Ferrari refused to sell out to him
Soichiro Honda - hard-drinking skirt-chaser who went from ping-ping bikes to F1 to the Civic in 15 years
Lee Iacocca - father of the Mustang
Bob Lutz - who knew he spent his formative years with BMW?
Ferdinand Piech - father of Audi's rebirth
Eberhard von Kuenheim - wunderkind savior of BMW

[Maverick]

Looks interesting, I'll have to check that out.

[Dudley Dawson]

Soichiro Honda - hard-drinking skirt-chaser

I knew there was more to my love of Hondas than solid engineering.

[Radio-Active]

I knew there was more to my love of Hondas than solid engineering.

I think they left the solid engineering in Japan. They now use ex-Pontiac engineers.

[motorollow]

So do we have a book of the month for October?

[Nails]

I just finished Richard Hammond's biography "Living on the Edge". Carazzie got it for me for my birthday.

Richard writes about his childhood and days in radio then landing his dream job with Top Gear.

While filming an episode in 2006 with a jet car, he had an accident that nearly killed him. So his wife, a saint, writes about his recovering from a coma and brain damage. Seems her biggest obstacle was dealing with his lack of short term memory. He would literally forget something just minutes after he said or did it. Pretty good book.

[Miatamaniac92]

http://www.amazon.com/Shop-Class-Sou...4858450&sr=8-1

Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Crawford extols the value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he calls manual competence, the ability to work with oneÖs hands. According to the author, our alienation from how our possessions are made and how they work takes many forms: the decline of shop class, the design of goods whose workings cannot be accessed by users (such as recent Mercedes models built without oil dipsticks) and the general disdain with which we regard the trades in our emerging information economy. Unlike todayÖs knowledge worker, whose work is often so abstract that standards of excellence cannot exist in many fields (consider corporate executives awarded bonuses as their companies sink into bankruptcy), the person who works with his or her hands submits to standards inherent in the work itself: the lights either turn on or they donÖt, the toilet flushes or it doesnÖt, the motorcycle roars or sputters. With wit and humor, the author deftly mixes the details of his own experience as a tradesman and then proprietor of a motorcycle repair shop with more philosophical considerations.

On the first chapter, so not much to report yet.

Chris