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Motorcycle Book Store > Motorcycle books beginning with E
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The Electroline Diaries: A journey with the Burbank Choppers car club |
Author: Laurent Bagnard
Published: 2007-10-01 |
List price: $34.95
Our price: $23.07
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As of: August 19th, 2008 10:07:57 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 This Book Is A Waste
Remember how you felt reading Henry Felsen's Hot Rod and Street Rod as a kid? This book isn't going to make you feel like that. You know how you can stare at the best pictures from Rolling Stone magazine and feel you know Bruce Springsteen personally? This book isn't like that, either.
In fact, this book is almost a complete failure. It fails those who know and love the Burbank Choppers and those who'd like to.
I hoped I'd feel a connection to the club or get a sense of who they were and what their lives were like. The photos aren't especially beautiful and don't convey much.
Remembering how great books and documentaries I've enjoyed about car clubs affected me, I had similar hopes for this book but I felt closer to hot rod culture reading Stephen King's Christine.
The Electroline Diaries is just plain uninteresting. Somewhere in the book (I don't care enough to look it up) someone describes the club as "Just like punk rock on wheels." I suppose Diaries is like that the same way shredded wheat is like punk rock in a bowl.
It seems to me that the author/photographer travelled a few thousand miles thinking he'd be able to do all this and ... just didn't want to go home (or back to his publisher) empty handed.
The Electroline Diaries contains 155 color and 120 black and white photos. The photography is competent to say the least. Some of the pictures are very nice. I might even put a couple pages up on the wall (until something else came along to replace them) but there's nothing unique. They could be of any cruise night or car show. It wouldn't hurt me to rip a page out to put on the wall because the book isn't much more than the sum of its parts. I wouldn't be as protective of it's condition as I would, say, my Bettie Page coffee table book.
Reading a book like this, I want to feel immersed in the subject matter. I want "Boys with Their First Car" by A.Y. Owen. I want to hear the engines and smell the smoke but it just doesn't happen. Diaries is $34.95 for a new softcover. You'd have to pay that much for an old, tattered copy of Street Rod or Hot Rod at a used bookstore but -- quite honestly --it would still be a better investment.
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