Compelling ... The rest is, of course, history, and one that is recounted colorfully and wittily in this volume. Appleyard draws upon a vast knowledge of science, mechanics and cultural lore as he successfully supports his thesis that the car didn’t merely influence the modern world — it created it ... Appleyard covers every conceivable automotive trend ... Whatever the future has in store, Bryan Appleyard has written an important account of automotive history that avoids the frequent transgression committed by Those Who Know A Lot: tossing everything in and creating an unwieldy hodgepodge. This book is beautifully restrained, yet manages to communicate a wealth of fascinating information.
At its best, Appleyard’s book stimulates exactly the feeling of being driven by a reckless but charismatic driver. Just as a wild drive is fun until the brakes come on, it is only when you put the book down that you notice the moments that it occasionally careens into bathos ... For the most part, the book rattles along nicely ... Appleyard’s breezy enthusiasm for his subject means that this is less a history, and more of a love letter. That affection is also the book’s shortcoming ... Just as the author is too quick to downplay the social cost of the car, he is too quick to believe Silicon Valley’s promises that the age of the automobile is coming to an end. Still, The Car is a fun ride, while it lasts.
This book is very much in that familiar voice: forward-looking but sceptical, gnomic but penetrating. It also has excellent anecdotes ... Appleyard likes to seize on a poignant detail ... Covers a huge amount of historical and technical territory ... Towards the end the tone turns elegiac.
The bulk of the book focuses on these grand themes of change, speckled with pithy tidbits of automotive and engineering history ... Mr. Appleyard does a good job chronicling the 1950s and ’60s heyday of American car culture ... Even if we’re browbeaten into a technology fraught with questions, Mr. Appleyard recognizes that it’ll fall short of the broad and universal impact cars had on society in the early 20th century.
Entertainingly forthright ... A book that almost delights in the contradictions wreaked by the automobile ... Appleyard has plenty more zingers where that one came from. In the first half of the book, they help animate a fast-moving narrative of industrial development, but in the second half they’re more often employed to disguise the fact that the story has run out of road. So economically and brightly does Appleyard establish the main plot points of the automobile’s progress and then crisis that after the halfway point he is increasingly reliant on revisiting popular culture to make his invariably witty points. Perhaps the car’s gradual automated demise is too dull and unromantic to engage his creative imagination.
A magisterial history ... Well-balanced ... This book is not just a history of the automobile; it is also a vibrant portrait of an age, a stimulating work of scholarship, and a top-notch example of nonfiction storytelling. The combination of the author’s propulsive writing style and journalistic thoroughness makes for compelling reading, particularly the technological, cultural, and aesthetic critiques he brings to bear ... It is hard to imagine a more complete study of the automobile, albeit with an ominous coda ... Readers may never look at their cars in quite the same way again.
