Jalopnik.com Book Reviews - Sun Oct 4 2009

You know how a lot of marque-specific car books tend to be a bit on the lightweight side? A couple of anecdotes about the designers and then a lot of pretty pictures? Not this monster!

See, if you're serious about Porsches- and what Porsche zealot isn't?- you want a book about Ferdinand Porsche, the father of the brand, to pack some heft! You'll need a level of detail that's so overwhelmingly, in fact alarmingly, obsessive that you'll learn something new on every page.

This is such a book. Nearly 500 pages, a bonanza of Über-Geeky technical details (ever wonder how Ferdinand managed to make the connecting-rod arrangement work in a W9 aircraft engine in 1917?), and eleventy-million vintage photographs. On top of that, you get eight gorgeous, porn-grade foldout color pages with cutaway illustrations by artist Wolfgang Franke, featuring such machines as the 1922 Austro-Daimler ADS-R and the 1936 Auto Union C-Type. This thing- which weighs about as much as a manhole cover- is definitely one of the most beautiful car books I've ever seen, and it will make the other car books on your coffee table look like Go, Dog Go.

Review of Ferdinand Porsche - Genesis of Genius from
http://jalopnik.com/5368335/ferdinand-porsche-+-genesis-of-genius-by-karl-ludvigsen - Sun Oct 4 2009