Tyrel
DC Crew
Registered: March 2004
Location: Honolulu
Posts: 282
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Review Date:
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Would you recommend the product? No |
Price you paid?: None indicated
| Rating: 4
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Pros:
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Huge, clear color photographs
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Cons:
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Consistently inaccurate on facts
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I got this book as a christmas gift and thought I would do a write-up. I'm sure this book came from a big-box bookstore, but I don't know which one.
Like I said above, the photographs in this book are huge and clear, and there are literally hundreds of them, covering every model of our beloved marque. You can spend hours just looking at the pictures. I only wish that this attention to presentation extended to the actual writing. The book is frequently and factually wrong. For example, on page 235 the author states "Corvettes had been made of plastic for over 20 years...". I can only assume that, judging from the pictures, he must have hung around Corvette afficionados while writing the book, and I find it hard to believe that in all that time he failed to absorb the fact that the bodies are made of fiberglass, not plastic. Many of the interior parts are made of plastic, so perhaps this is what he meant.
Henshaw also states, on page 293, that the 1984 Corvette had "...an optional lift-off roof panel...", another indication that he didn't do his research, since everyone knows the roof panel was standard.
Page 153 is really a howler. A 67 coupe is shown with the hood up, and an obviously updated engine with an intake that was unimaginable in the 60s. Henshaw states: "The engine was always the heart of any Corvette, especially when the V8 in question was an L88...". Any idiot can tell by looking at the engine that it wasn't built in the 60s.
However, there are lots of interesting tidbits that Henshaw includes, this on page 297 while speaking of the 1986 convertible: "The new-generation open-top Corvette was not actually initiated by McLellan or anyone else within General Motors, but by Heinz Prechter of ASC Inc., who had converted a 1984 car and showed him the result. McLellan was sufficiently impressed to go ahead and develop General Motors' own version...". The book is filled with interesting information such as this, even if Henshaw misspells John Cafaro's name.
Although the photographs are good quality, I get the distinct impression that for most of the pictures, the photographer simply went to a Corvette show and asked owners to drive their cars past a staging area, since the background looks the same in all the photographs: an alpine area with rolling hills and trees. In addition, it would have been nice to see stock cars with factory appearance, but nearly all of them have aftermarket wheels, rear wings, taillamp louvers, weird colors, and rock chips in the front hood. The pictures include the owners in their cars, not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a little difficult to appreciate the car when a fifty-something guy in a too-small t-shirt is sitting behind the wheel.
All-in-all, this is a fair book, not the best book in my collection but not the worst either. I feel the author sometimes talks down to the car a bit, especially when he rags on the 84-89 digital dash or the supposed plethora of c4 deficiencies that were "cured" with the introduction of the c5. He doesn't seem like much of a fan of the car, and his bias certainly shows.
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MLNEMVette
DC Crew
Registered: April 2007
Location: Camdenton, Missouri
Posts: 574
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Review Date:
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: None indicated
| Rating: 0
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I just started reading this book and noted some errors right away. The best so far was this tidbit:
"... the 1955 (Corvette)Nomad was already past the prototype stage before Motorama, but even so the Corvette wagon was a great success, and over 30,000 were sold up to 1957."
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