The Toyota Land Cruiser (On the Road (Mankato, Minn.).)

Rating:
Summary: Childrens level reading
Review: If you are just starting out learning to read and want to learn about the Toyota Land Crusier, then this is the book for you. The opening chapter starts out with such dazzeling insights as "Toyota Land Cruisers are sport utility vehicles (SUVs). These vehicles have many uses. Land Cruisers can travel on and off roads. They can carry up to eight passangers. Land Cruisers calso can haul heavy items or pull trailers."

If I had noticed that this book has only 48 pages I would have spent my money on something else. Especially since 6 of those pages are spent on explaining how an internal combustion engine works. Also there's a full page image of a Jeep with the caption "Toyota had to improve Land Cruisers because U.S. automakers also were building SUVs."

If you think this is the kind of bedtime reading you'd like to share with your children then get this book. For any substantial information, skip it. I have no idea why this book was published, with it's grade-school level english and lack of any detailed info on Land Cruisers it is absolutely useless to me.

Rating:
Summary: Good text for children's book, poor illustrations - rush job
Review: This is a book written in a language suitable for young readers. The author is someone who writes scores of children's books every year on every topic under the sun. Nevertheless, he does a good job of telling the story of the Land Cruiser, although it is limited to the models available in the US (a small fraction of the LC lineup). There is also a chapter on the early LCs that were not sold in the US, though.

A generic chapter on the workings of the internal combustion engine seems tacked on. It has a few two-dimensional sectional drawings showing how an engine works. It is hard enough to understand the workings of an engine from a three-dimensional drawing. Even more difficult from a two-dimensional one.

I am an adult myself, so I can't speak for children, but I suspect many children will find it hard to get through because of its scarcity of illustrations. Moreover, the author or the editors didn't do a good job in finding good pictures for the book. No factory pictures are used, only ones provided by various agencies. Many pictures are really the same vehicle from different angles.

Trying to capture the audience, it is a glaring fault that the book opens with a long chapter on the BJ (the first LC) without a single picture of what it looked like. Later in the book, a photograph shows the engine bay on a contempoary Series 100 LC, in which the engine is completely covered by a black plastic shroud. The caption for this picture reads: "Internal combustion engines create power by burning gas in the combustion chambers". This is an example of how there is often no relation between the picture and the caption.

A good book is "The Land Cruiser - Special Issue of 50th Anniversary - 1951~2001" by Sachio M. Yajima, 4x4Magazine Co. Ltd in Japanese/English. It has a mix of factory and agency photos and describes the complete history of the LC on a global basis. This book is hard to find and doesn't seem to have an ISBN.