Automotive Books

In SLINGSHOT SPECTACULAR Steve Reyes once again shares some of his archive of images from what is now called the 'Golden Era' of drag racing. I spent many a weekend standing next to Steve at numerous drag races and it's truly a joy to look at this well produced book. If you're a drag racing fan, this is a must have book.

In drag racing's classic era Steve Reyes was considered the sport's greatest action photographer, mesmerizing fans every month with his work in Drag Racing USA magazine. This book has hundreds of front-engined top fuel dragsters, the sport's most iconic class. Fantastic stuff and not to be missed. All the big stars and the lesser-known weekend warriors too. I lived through this era and saw many of these cars. This book is as good as it gets. A+.

This is the best book on Small Gas Engines that we have found. This is the text for our Small Gas Engines course at Clark State Community College. This is a good place for anyone to learn about the basics of small gas engines and how they operate.

The book is well written and orgainized.
It exhaustively covers the subject.

Great manual for repairing your yard tractor.

In the first part, the book give the essential procedures, for each listed tractor, to take apart garden tractors major sections as :  - Front axle and steering system  - Drive belts, clutch, brake, PTO drive  - Transaxle (gear and hydrostatic)  - Hydraulic system The adjustment procedure where it's applicable with excellent exploded view of each section. The second part treat of transaxles by brand name for overhaul procedure. The last part contains the overhaul procedure for almost all garden tractor's engine treated in first part with remove and install procedure, critical torque specifications and referenced figures. It cover the mechanical and electrical section. Very usefull book!

"Solar Sailing" is the most comprehensive book yet written on solar sailing. This is suggested by the introduction, which gives the history of solar sailing, discusses the basic principles, summarizes the topics of the rest of the book, and concludes with a rich list of references to further material. What follows are six more chapters that delve into the topics of solar sailing: solar radiation pressure, design, orbital mechanics, non-Keplerian orbits, mission applications, and laser sailing. In addition to being an excellent resource on both basic and advanced solar sailing principles, "Solar Sailing" also provides the very latest information on mission applications which are under study right now in chapter 6, like the Geostorm mission for early detection of geomagnetic storms and the sun-synchronous Mercury orbiter. Chapter 3, in addition to discussing solar sail design, describes several historical solar sail designs, mostly from the race to the moon and Mars proposed for the early 1990's.

Each chapter begins with an introduction to the concepts, then discusses them in increasing detail, starting with basic concepts that a beginner or enthusiast can use, and ending with topics that are useful for a detailed engineering analysis. A Equations are provided at every level, so a reader can immediately begin using the material in the book to study solar sailing for themselves. For example, the chapter on radiation pressure begins with a the history of the topic and quantum and electromagnetic explanations for light pressure. Following this are increasingly detailed discussions of the force acting on a solar sail, ranging from perfectly flat and reflective sails and treating the sun as a point, to radiative transfer methods for treating the sun as a disk-shaped light source and curved sails with imperfect reflection.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in solar sailing, from beginners to professionals. Although some of the material in this book can be found in other sources, like technical journals, this book organizes the information in a form that is immediately useful, and covers the basics required to understand the more advanced topics.

This is an excellent book on solar sailing. What I like best about it is that it gives not only useful results for several mission application case studies but the means to derive those results for oneself.

The book begins with a history of the topic and some possible applications, as well as some brief comparisons with other forms of propulsion and a couple of important performance metrics (in particular, the characteristic acceleration). Next is a discussion of radiation pressure, where we start by being carefully walked through the calculation of the force on a perfectly reflecting sail. That gets us in the right mood to examine radiative transfer methods, effects of a non-zero area for the solar disc, and solar sail force models for realistic sails.

After that, McInnes discusses solar sail design parameters, sail materials, sail structures, and sail configurations. That includes an excellent introduction to packing, deployment, and control issues.

Now we get to my favorite chapters: solar sail orbital dynamics, for both Keplerian and non-Keplerian orbits (both Sun-centered and planet-centered). The whole point of using solar sails is to make good use of a small but constant thrust, so a main application is to "levitate" the orbit above the Sun or above a planet. McInnes examines the characteristics, controllabilty, and stability of some of these orbits. And he then obtains results for orbits near Lagrange points (both planetary and lunar).

Few books in any field do as good a job at getting the reader up to speed on a topic. A person who has completed this book ought to be able to delve into any of the most recent literature in the field without fear.

Space Politics and Policy is an essential reading to any student of space policy. The essays are well written and
concise. Careful reading of the book will provide greater context and depth to understanding more contemporary space literature. Dr. Eligar Sadeh's introduction should be kept in the forefront of the reader's mind to gain greater insight of the subsequent essays by various renowed personalities in the field.

Quick disclaimer in that I used this text book while attending a course led by the author in prepublished addition in 2002. That being said, I still feel to this day, 3 years later that this book is a good source for understanding the players involved in space exploration. I've referred back to it more than a few times throughout my career as someone involved in doing business with the government. The book is set up as a series of essays about a particular topic written by experts that specialize in that particular topic. A quick look at the table of contents reads as a whos who in the academic space policy world.

If understanding today's political decision making process used for government space acquisition is your goal, then I highly recommend this book.

Provides the only text I have seen on quaternion math and its relation to more traditional attitude matrices and Euler dynamics. The presentation allows algorithm generation without too much fuss, and it is rigorous but not to a fault. Definitely graduate level reference material for practicing ACS engineers. I have found it indispensable.

This book is intended for technical professionals, who want an exhaustive mathematical and geometric reference to the techniques of spacecraft attitude determination and attitude control.

Although the book is a little old, the principles are still relevant, and there is simply no other comparable compilation.

I bought this book as research for a paper on water and food production on long-term space missions. The book is well written, easy to read, and packed with lots of good information. Very useful.

Spaceflight life support and biospherics is a very well written book that gives engineers, scientists and students all information needed for this topic. It may become, or it is already, the Standard-Handbook on life support systems for space.

My husband (a police officer) loved this book, he looks at it often, "boys and toys"......

The only other book that comes close to this is Concord's "Special Operations Journals (SOJs)." If you never heard of Concord, that's because it's a thin book mainly found in your hobby store, not your bookstore. You would have to buy several SOJs just to have all the police departments covered in this one book.

"A picture is worth a thousand words..."

This book has excellent color photos to accompany the text. While the photos may not be besides the text, at least you can see what Larry Shapiro is talking about. That helps a lot. Very rarely does he discuss a vehicle that he doesn't have a photo of.

The book is divided into chapters with each chapter covering a U.S. elite city police: New York ESU, Miami Metro-Dade. Orange Country, LAPD, and as few more.

Covered vehicles are: armored cars, tracked armored vehicles, Light Armored Vehicles, bomb trucks, harbor rescue, mobile command trucks, semi trucks, box trucks, and more used by police departments for special operations and rescues.

The text describes the weapons, layout, robots, some specs, equipment, and purpose of these vehicles. Also covered are SWAT incidents the city encountered which is nice because unless you live in that city or it's in the paper, you would never know about this incident. The book is very up-to-date and describes lessons learned and action taken after WACO, the World Trade Center bombings, the Hollywood shoot-outs, and more.

This book has no competitor. It reads like an infomation brief to police officers. Detailed, in-depth, and very interesting.

The vehicles are indeed special and Larry Shapiro did a fine job in selecting and photographing each. The author asked questions and gathered information from elite police units that would be time-consuming or difficult for the public to obtain. I certainly learned a lot reading this book.

For fans of the 1950's Chevrolets, Jon Robinson's 192-page book is well worth the wait. This compilation is dated 2006, and is in soft-cover form. We've seen efforts like this in the past with the Consumers Guide hardcover publication from 1993 and 1995's "The Hot Ones," by Anthony Young and Mike Mueller. Mr. Mueller and Mike Key also did brief pictorials on the tri-fives that were worth buying and preserving. In 2003, Robert Genat gave us his colorful, but flawed, "Original Chevrolet, 1955-1956-1957. In between, there have been a number of other publications, most of which lacked the color photographs and illustrations so sumptuously provided in this book by Mr. Robinson. Without confirming every fact and figure (which would be a monumental task) Robinson's book combines the important statistical and technical data with ads and other graphics from the period. Most of these are in color, as are recent photos of these now-classic cars. I would highly recommend Robinson's book to any fans of Chevrolets of the 1950's.

It is very good catalog but instead of supplying multiple images for a sigle vehicle from a certain year it could be better to have more photos of different models from the same year. Technical data could be more detailed.

I beleive that anyone looking for an automobile that could have been made in the US, will find it in this book. Very well written and informative.

The Author's of this book have done a fantastic job of researching and documenting the early history of the American automobile. I have found this book to be an invaluable reference in researching the history of the automobile stock and bond certificates which I collect.

Even the most obscure and low-key manufacturer is covered. This book is well worth it's price and my only criticism would be...if all other readers used it as much as I do...please publish the next edition in hardcover!!