Lauren Fix's Guide to Loving Your Car: Everything You Need to Know to Take Charge of Your Car and Get on with Your Life

Jeremy Clarkson

Clarkson on Cars

Jeremy Clarkson gets under the bonnet in Clarkson on Cars , a collection of his motoring journalism. Jeremy Clarkson has been driving cars, writing about them, and occasionally voicing his opinions on the BBC's Top Gear for 20 years. No one in the business is taller. In this collection of classic Clarkson, stretching back to the mid-1980s, he's pulled together the car columns and stories with which he made his name. As coal mines closed and house prices exploded to a soundtrack of men in make-up playing synthesizers, Jeremy was already waxing lyrical on topics as useful and diverse as the perils of bicycle ownership, why Australians--not Brits--need bull bars, why soon only geriatrics will be driving BMWs, the difficultly of deciding on the best car for your wedding, why Jesus's dad would have owned a Nissan Bluebird, and why it is that bus lanes cause traffic jams. Irreverent, damn funny, and offensive to almost everyone, this is writing with its foot to the floor, the brake lines cut, and the speed limit smashed to smithereens. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson

The Perfect Vehicle: What It is about Motorcycles

In a book that is "a must for anyone who has loved a motorcycle" (Oliver Sacks), Melissa Pierson captures in vivid, writerly prose the mysterious attractions of motorcycling. She sifts through myth and hyperbole: misrepresentations about danger, about the type of people who ride and why they do so. The Perfect Vehicle is not a mere recitation of facts, nor is it a polemic or apologia. Its vivid historical accounts-the beginnings of the machine, the often hidden tradition of women who ride, the tale of the defiant ones who taunt death on the racetrack-are intertwined with Pierson's own story, which, in itself, shows that although you may think you know what kind of person rides a motorcycle, you probably don't.

Dennis Adler

Daimler & Benz: The Complete History: The Birth and Evolution of the Mercedes-Benz

From the earliest workshop days to the grandest marque in the automotive world, the story of one of the most important enterprises of the twentieth century comes alive in this complete history.The rich history of Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler) has its roots in the early experimentation with the use of the internal combustion engine by three men: Carl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and William Maybach. Benz, working alone, and Daimler and Maybach, working together, the two shops separated by a mere sixty miles, in the late 1880s simultaneously laid the foundation of what would become the German automotive industry.At first there was competition between Benz & Cie. and Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, as they engineered and styled the earliest motorwagens and began to develop markets for their products. These early efforts led to the establishment of an entire industry by the start of World War I.But the war and its aftermath devastated these two companies, as it did the German economy overall. By the early 1920s it became apparent that the only way to survival was a merger, and thus, on June 29, 1926, the stockholders of both companies gave approval to the new company, Daimler-Benz, which ...