Still Life with Volkswagens

Still Life with Volkswagens
Author: Geoff Nicholson
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 198
Release: 1995-10-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1468305832

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Throughout the land VW Beetles are spontaneously combusting. Nazi skinheads are cruising the streets and a millionaire tycoon and a weather girl have been kidnapped. It falls to Barry Osgathorpe to discover who is responsible.

Volkswagen Beetles and Buses

Volkswagen Beetles and Buses
Author: Russell Hayes
Publisher: Motorbooks
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 0760367663

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This illustrated history celebrates the 75th and 70th anniversaries of Volkswagen's two most iconic vehicles, from the first Beetles spearheaded by Ferdinand Porsche in the 1940s to the buses that became synonymous with a generation. Volkswagen is one of the most beloved brands in motoring history, thanks largely to two instantly recognizable vehicles: the Beetle (a.k.a. Bug) and the Bus. More than 23 million VW Beetles have buzzed into the world since 1945, while the VW Bus presaged the minivan by thirty-plus years. Volkswagen: Beetles and Buses examines and celebrates all aspects of the vehicles and the many cultural associations that have swirled around them for more than seven decades. The diminutive rear-engined and easily mass-produced Beetle became the most popular imported car in America during the 1960s. Its success was due to its familiar face, its wildly clever ad campaigns, and the sheer numbers produced. The equally compact yet spacious Bus (a.k.a. Kombi, Microbus, Type 2, Transporter, and simply “van”) has won millions of fans around the world with its practicality, simplicity, and design. In this beautifully illustrated and authoritatively written celebration, author Russell Hayes looks back at the vehicles while focusing on the classic air-cooled VWs that ran into the late 1970s. Along the way, readers witness the Beetle and Bus at work and at play and learn about vehicle development and growing roles in popular culture, including star appearances in films like The Love Bug, Little Miss Sunshine, Footloose, Fight Club, The Big Lebowski, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as well as television shows like Lost and Once Upon a Time and on the covers of the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ album. The story is brought up to date with coverage of the New Beetle and plans for the VW Buzz, a modern electric version of the iconic Microbus due in 2022. Volkswagen: Beetles and Buses deserves a place in the motoring libraries of VW owners, automotive enthusiasts, and those simply interested in pop culture. It's the ultimate illustrated history of these beloved vehicles.

The Best Novels of the Nineties

The Best Novels of the Nineties
Author: Linda Parent Lesher
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476603898

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This reader’s guide provides uniquely organized and up-to-date information on the most important and enjoyable contemporary English-language novels. Offering critically substantiated reading recommendations, careful cross-referencing, and extensive indexing, this book is appropriate for both the weekend reader looking for the best new mystery and the full-time graduate student hoping to survey the latest in magical realism. More than 1,000 titles are included, each entry citing major reviews and giving a brief description for each book.

Still Life with Cars

Still Life with Cars
Author: John L. Lumley
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2010-06-28
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 078648117X

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Most childhood fascinations are a passing fancy, but something about cars tends to capture the imagination forever. Witness the countless backyard weed-wrapped classics, rusted just shy of a shadow, slated one day for a return to glory; cloudy vacation memories of choking exhaust, deafening engines and blinding chrome; countless white-knuckled highway moments as the driver faces backwards to better glimpse some passing oddity spotted four lanes over. Somehow, cars have a way of getting into a kid's blood. Any chronic condition requires a lifetime of maintenance. John Lumley caught the fever early--likely from a midnight blue Hudson--and it's been with him ever since. This engaging memoir follows a life spent nursing an obsession with cars, fitting for a son of Detroit's heyday. With occasional play in the garage of the Ford estate and an excursion to see Buckminster Fuller's three-wheeled Dymaxion among his earliest memories, John Lumley's enduring love of cars is no surprise. From those childhood adventures followed a lifetime spent elbow-deep in engines--Nash, Hupmobile, Mercury, Citroen, Triumph, Volkswagen, Lagonda, Armstrong-Siddeley, Bentley and more, many of them pictured. Though his career was devoted to loftier pursuits, the grease beneath his nails perhaps best sums up Lumley's lifelong love. Fifty-eight photographs and an index accompany the text.

Thinking Small

Thinking Small
Author: Andrea Hiott
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2012-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0345521447

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Sometimes achieving big things requires the ability to think small. This simple concept was the driving force that propelled the Volkswagen Beetle to become an avatar of American-style freedom, a household brand, and a global icon. The VW Bug inspired the ad men of Madison Avenue, beguiled Woodstock Nation, and has recently been re-imagined for the hipster generation. And while today it is surely one of the most recognizable cars in the world, few of us know the compelling details of this car’s story. In Thinking Small, journalist and cultural historian Andrea Hiott retraces the improbable journey of this little car that changed the world. Andrea Hiott’s wide-ranging narrative stretches from the factory floors of Weimar Germany to the executive suites of today’s automotive innovators, showing how a succession of artists and engineers shepherded the Beetle to market through periods of privation and war, reconstruction and recovery. Henry Ford’s Model T may have revolutionized the American auto industry, but for years Europe remained a place where only the elite drove cars. That all changed with the advent of the Volkswagen, the product of a Nazi initiative to bring driving to the masses. But Hitler’s concept of “the people’s car” would soon take on new meaning. As Germany rebuilt from the rubble of World War II, a whole generation succumbed to the charms of the world’s most huggable automobile. Indeed, the story of the Volkswagen is a story about people, and Hiott introduces us to the men who believed in it, built it, and sold it: Ferdinand Porsche, the visionary Austrian automobile designer whose futuristic dream of an affordable family vehicle was fatally compromised by his patron Adolf Hitler’s monomaniacal drive toward war; Heinrich Nordhoff, the forward-thinking German industrialist whose management innovations made mass production of the Beetle a reality; and Bill Bernbach, the Jewish American advertising executive whose team of Madison Avenue mavericks dreamed up the legendary ad campaign that transformed the quintessential German compact into an outsize worldwide phenomenon. Thinking Small is the remarkable story of an automobile and an idea. Hatched in an age of darkness, the Beetle emerged into the light of a new era as a symbol of individuality and personal mobility—a triumph not of the will but of the imagination.

Walking on Thin Air

Walking on Thin Air
Author: Geoff Nicholson
Publisher: Saqi Books
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2023-08-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1908906588

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Geoff Nicholson has been walking his whole life. Wherever he is and wherever he goes in the world, he walks and writes about what he sees and feels. Here he reflects on the nature of walking, why we do it, how it benefits us and, in some cases, how it can damage and even destroy us. Geoff's recent diagnosis with a rare, incurable form of cancer has made him all too aware of his own mortality. Sooner or later there will be a last step, a last excursion, a final drift, for him just as there will be for all of us. Geoff vows to continue to walk for as long as he can. This moving, vital book describes his own walks and relates them to the walks of street photographers, artists and writers, such as Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Sophie Calle, Jorge Luis Borges and Virginia Woolf, among many others. Walking on Thin Air is a book about mortality and, above all, a celebration of being alive.

Volkswagen Cars and Trucks

Volkswagen Cars and Trucks
Author: Keith Seume
Publisher:
Total Pages: 182
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 9781610592468

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Bug

Bug
Author: Phil Patton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2002
Genre: Volkswagen Beetle automobile
ISBN: 0743202422

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Patton chronicles the remarkable journey of the Volkswagen Beetle--the world's most famous car--from Nazism to the sixties counterculture, the Cold War and today's global manufacturing.

Africa's Great North Road in a VW Camper

Africa's Great North Road in a VW Camper
Author: Ted Jones
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 573
Release: 2012
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1475926952

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Emma and I most cordially invite you to accompany us as our special arm-chair guest on an overland journey through the most exciting continent on the Planet Earth. We shall begin our journey in Cape Town, South Africa in the fall of 1964. During the following ten months we will travel and camp along Africa's Great North Road. A variety of recently created nations and peoples, a few still struggling to be free, will be visited, among them, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the Congo. There are, at present, more than 700 separate tribes living south of the Great Sahara Desert. Obviously all of them cannot be included. However, we will visit and camp-out with the typical African where he lives, whether it be an Afrikaner living in one of the exclusive multi-level homes cut into the rock cliffs overlooking the Bay of Cape Town surrounded by twelve-foot walls capped with broken glass and razor wire or a Wanderobo tribesman dressed in a loincloth and carrying a bow and sheath of poisoned arrows met along a primitive dusty track running through the Bush country of Tanzania. Our self-contained VW camper gave us the freedom to camp along the streets of any city or village or along the track where Native Africans were living much as they have for many hundreds of years. Please be prepared, watching people and so-called "wild" animals can take many hours and, in some instances, the supply of daylight runs out. Frequently camp was made along the track out in the Bush and was visited by elephants during the night or a pride of lions stopping by to sharpen their claws on our tires. In one instance several elephants stripped branches off a tree under which we were camped - not one of them touched the camper! It was not unusual to be awakened early in the morning by curious men, women and children who wondered what we were doing; curious but quiet and polite. We never experienced an unpleasant incident while camped out in the Bush. Getting lost in the Congo could have been a fatal mistake! My lack of attention exposed us to an outlaw group of renegades left over from the Tanzania-Uganda War. A serious effort has been made throughout to record the details and opinions as the events took place and our conclusions were formulated. The events, we think, have been accurately recorded. The opinions represent our personal interpretations and tentative conclusions. It is our sincere hope that an open-minded reading of our book will increase the degree of public conscious awareness, with respect to the critical predicament of the African peoples, their culture, environment, wildlife and other natural resources.

The City Under the Skin

The City Under the Skin
Author: Geoff Nicholson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 142995485X

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A cartographic thriller with so many twists and turns it requires its own map A cartography-obsessed misfit clerk from an antique map store in a district that's not quite trendy yet. A bold young woman chasing the answer to a question she can't quite formulate. A petty criminal hoping the parking lot he's just purchased is the ticket to a new life of respectability with his school-age daughter. A ruthless but vulnerable killer and his disgruntled accomplice. In The City Under the Skin, it's not fate that will bind these characters together but something more concrete and sinister: the appearance of a group of mysterious women, their backs crudely and extensively tattooed with maps. They have been kidnapped, marked, and released, otherwise unharmed. When one turns up on the doorstep of the map shop and abruptly bares her back, only to be hustled away by a man in a beat-up blue Cadillac, it's the misfit clerk Zak, pushed by his curious new friend Marilyn, who finds himself reluctantly entering a criminal underworld whose existence he'd prefer to ignore. In this haunting literary thriller, Geoff Nicholson paints a deft portrait of a city in transition. His sharply drawn characters are people desperate to know where they are but scared of being truly seen. A meditation on obsession and revenge, a hymn to the joys of urban exploration, The City Under the Skin is a wholly original novel about the indelible scars we both live with and inflict on others.