Archive for Author 'Helen Hutchings', only excerpts shown, click title for full entry.

Rails Around the World Two Centuries of Trains and Locomotives

by Brian Solomon

You’d be hard-pressed to encounter working steam locos next to record-breaking electric trains in real life so a book is the way to behold all that rich history. Just think: Solomon could have looked thousands of years back and found tracked transport.

George Westinghouse, Powering the World

by William R. Huber

His teachers thought he was mentally disabled. He quit college, but he received his first patent at the age of 19. Hundreds more would follow and he became a captain of industry, his 60-odd companies providing paychecks to tens of thousands and changing the world.

Eastern Air Lines: A History, 1926–1991

by David Lee Russell

Once upon a time Eastern was the most profitable airline in the postwar era. It became Walt Disney World’s official airline. Then: strikes, fuel crisis, deregulation, management shake-ups—bankruptcy.

Le Mans 100, A Century at the World’s Greatest Endurance Race

by Glen Smale

The 24 Hours of Le Mans is one of the three legs of the Triple Crown of Motorsports. What makes it so special? Smale has wrangled each and every race up to the 2023 running into the pages of one concise, nicely illustrated, and well-designed book.

The Man and Car that Circled the Globe

by G. N. Schuster and J. Mahl

Forget the 1965 movie The Great Race. This book tells and shows what it was really like back in 1908, when traveling 22,000 miles in 169 days was as untried as space travel to Mars is today.

Crusader, John Cobb’s Ill-Fated Quest for Speed on Water 

by Steve Holter

For what do you need 5000 lb of thrust? For breaking records. In a jet-powered boat. Air is relatively smooth, water is not. Will it all go right? The author is, among other things, a crash investigator—so probably not.

Dreamers

by Cornelis van den Berg

If you dream about going into car manufacturing, look at these guys. One of them had actually done it for real—TAD Crook aka “Mr. Bristol.” Long retired, he sat for an interview, from which is spun this narrative nonfiction the publisher calls “accurate, but not always factual.”

America’s Greatest Road Trip!

by Tom Cotter and Michael Alan Ross

A couple thousand miles, a couple thousand photos and, hey presto, a book! And for once he’s not on the trail of the next barn find. Initially he thought he’d drive an ‘80s Corvette. That would have been a whole different trip! Instead a brand-new Ford Bronco and Airstream trailer—provided free by their respective makers—do the honors.

Flying with the SPOOKS, Memoir of a Navy Linguist in the Vietnam War

by Herbert P. Shippey

“Join the Navy and see the world!” The U.S. Navy is probably not the first armed service that springs to mind when you think Vietnam—in fact, many people joined the Navy specifically to avoid going there. Navy SIGINT has not been covered extensively and much info was classified for 40 years.

Fast Lady, The Extraordinary Adventures of Miss Dorothy Levitt

by Michael W. Barton

“The Fastest Girl on Earth” had plenty of adventures in life but an inquest ruled her death of morphine poisoning at 40 a misadventure. What good is it to be the first British woman racing driver, the world’s first holder of a water speed record, the first woman to hold a land speed record if no one remembers?

OBD-I & OBD-II, A Complete Guide to Diagnosis, Repair, and Emissions Compliance  

by Greg Banish

Are you the sort of person who puts masking tape over that annoying Check Engine light? If your car has an ECU, realize that more and more states require a recent OBD-reader analysis in order to renew registration.

Pan Am Ferry Tales: A World War II Aviation Memoir

by W. Gordon Schmitt

Ferrying supplies, personnel, and aircraft to far-flung corners of the globe is expensive and complicated. PAA already had the know-how and the infrastructure when the US decided that Africa and Egypt were of supreme strategic importance to the war effort. Here, a navigator looks back.

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