Dennis Adler

Ferrari: 75 Years, by Dennis Adler, is a celebration of Ferrari's long history of road and race success. The photographs, as expected, are phenomenal and the text is a wonderful blend of history and automotive specifications.

Whether you own, or have owned, a Ferrari or simply have admired them, this book will fill in the narrative(s) around the manufacturer. As a history of the brand Adler offers an easy to read and quite interesting account of the people and places that helped shape both the vehicles and the Ferrari name. If you happen to be as interested in the specs for the models, most of them are mentioned and, I think, will satisfy that segment of the readership. Yet it wasn't so much that it made my eyes glaze over.

If you love Ferraris or just love beautiful coffee table books, this will be a great addition to your library. If you also like to read your coffee table books (trust me, I know plenty of people who read only captions and skim the rest) this will be an enjoyable read.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (altro)

To call this book "The Complete History" is a bit of a stretch, as it's a little too hagiographic for that. I was enjoying it well enough though, at least until I got to the portion dealing with Mercedes-Benz and the Second World War. While I'm not expecting Adler to be a muckracker, simply too much bad-faith behavior is glossed over (or blamed on a few bad Germans) and I pretty much set the book aside. So do yourself a favor if you prefer not to dwell on the late-unpleasantness of the 1940s, and skip said chapter. Otherwise hunt down Neil Gregor's "Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich," where you will learn a great deal about the nature of the German production system and the degree of complicity of German automotive upper management with Nazi politics.… (altro)