After the death of her mother, Kay Seger abandons her career as a historical consultant to a Los Angeles film company and returns to her childhood home in Michigan. There, she rekindles a teenage love affair with Joe Chase, now a Vietnam War veteran and Ford auto worker. Afflicted by grief and the mysterious symptoms of an unidentified ailment, Kay, at Joe's urging, begins an investigation of her family's past. As Kay pores over the boxes of papers, letters, and photo albums her mother left behind, vivid recollections of a bygone Detroit, ragged and teeming at the start of the automotive age, come to life alongside snapshots of Michigan's rural western counties after the settlement of the frontier. In the midst of her searches, Kay comes across the long-forgotten medical history of nostalgia, and it is this new knowledge that helps her to recover the lost histories of her family and find a resolution to her troubled relationship with Joe. An exploration of memory as both pathology and promise, Ford Roadoffers a moving examination of the injuries we inflict on the people closest to us, the worldly injuries that are often beyond our control, and our astonishing ability to act upon and inhabit our own stories. It is also a meditation on American car culture, the road, and the role of early Hollywood in the creation of America's vision of itself. Written in spare, evocative prose, historian Amy Kenyon's first novel is as heartbreaking as it is thought-provoking.

If you love cars, you will love this incredibly exciting social history of Ford's Model A. Acclaimed historian, Peter Winnewisser gives you a complete treatment of what this well-built car meant to the Ford Motor Company, the workers who built them, the dealers who sold them, the people who bought them and the neighbourhoods the Ford factories called home. This book offers an entertaining look at how the Model A helped to carry a nation through the Great Depression as well as serving as an ambassador to America's automobile past. It is full of anecdotes from owners, dealers and Ford executives complete with a comprehensive bibliography based on authentic period material from the Ford Motor Company. Plus more than 300 photographs, many from the Ford Motor Company's archives, allow you to trace and develop the Model A's rise to prominence.

Driverless cars are on the horizon, but before the world falls asleep in the driver’s seat, let’s take a look back down the road from whence we have come. Ford Model-T Coast-to-Coast, documents the cross-country adventure of two brave drivers as they pilot a century-old Model-T on a 3,000-mile journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Coast. The book is as much a contemplation of early-20th century American life as it is a fond farewell to the automotive age. Can the car still be the vehicle of freedom and discovery, when we’re no longer in command? Or will we finally be able to fully appreciate the scenery rushing past? Accompanied by Michael Alan Ross’ evocative photography, author Tom Cotter stops in small towns, meets local people and hears their stories about cars, travel, and life. Cotter and Ross also explore back roads adjacent to his main route, the Lincoln Highway—the first transcontinental road. Significant cross-country runs, such as those by speed-record setter Cannonball Baker, and literary adventurers such as Jack Kerourac, John Steinbeck and Bill Bryson are considered in light of the driverless future. Cotter also drives some of the same roads that a young Edsel Ford traveled in his father’s Model T upon high school graduation in 1917. In addition to the central road trip, Cotter also visits interesting automotive and transport museums as well as “keepers of the flame” such as Model-T clubs, mechanics, junkyards and collectors across the country. He also records the numerous trials and tribulations in keeping a 100-year-old car operating on a 3,000-mile journey, something the driverless car of the future is unlikely to encounter. Join Cotter on his "slow drive across a fast country." You'll be glad you did.

A “fascinating slice of rarely considered American history” (Booklist)—the story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison—whose annual summer sojourns introduced the road trip to our culture and made the automobile an essential part of modern life. In 1914 Henry Ford and naturalist John Burroughs visited Thomas Edison in Florida and toured the Everglades. The following year Ford, Edison, and tire maker Harvey Firestone joined together on a summer camping trip and decided to call themselves the Vagabonds. They would continue their summer road trips until 1925, when they announced that their fame made it too difficult for them to carry on. Although the Vagabonds traveled with an entourage of chefs, butlers, and others, this elite fraternity also had a serious purpose: to examine the conditions of America’s roadways and improve the practicality of automobile travel. Cars were unreliable and the roads were even worse. But newspaper coverage of these trips was extensive, and as cars and roads improved, the summer trip by automobile soon became a desired element of American life. The Vagabonds is “a portrait of America’s burgeoning love affair with the automobile” (NPR) but it also sheds light on the important relationship between the older Edison and the younger Ford, who once worked for the famous inventor. The road trips made the automobile ubiquitous and magnified Ford’s reputation, even as Edison’s diminished. The automobile would transform the American landscape, the American economy, and the American way of life and Guinn brings this seminal moment in history to vivid life.

The Complete Book of Classic Ford Tractors presents the evolution of the popular machines from 1917 to 1996. Model histories are accompanied by detailed specification charts and, of course, gorgeous photography of restored models.