Cadillac: 100 Years of Innovation

Rating:
Summary: A highly recommended study for any Cadillac enthusiast
Review: Fans of Cadillacs and old-style cars will find Angelo Van Bogart's Cadillac a lovely pictorial survey of 100 years of changing Cadillac style, surveying the car's style, changes, and century of success. While Cadillac lends to coffee-table coverage with its gorgeous color photos, it also rounds out the pictures with plenty of historical text, making it a highly recommended study for any Cadillac enthusiast.

Rating:
Summary: Great photography, concise, cleverly organized
Review: This is a great book for the casual Cadillac enthusiast who seeks a solid, well-rounded book about the marque; it's also good for the die-hard types like me who simply like to have as many beautiful color photos of Cadillacs as they can contain on their bookshelves.

The photography is stunning and other illustrations in the book are fascinating and often quite original, i.e. the sort that you don't commonly find in other books or Web sites on the subject.

One unique aspect of this book that I particularly appreciate is the way it is organized. Every other book on the subject follows the same proven approach: a chronologically organized history of the marque. Van Bogart's book, by contrast, is divided into different histories focusing on different aspects of the marque rather than a single history that encompasses all of them. For example, after reading a general history, the chronology repeats again, this time focusing on Cadillac's impact on pop culture, then again focusing on Cadillac's innovations, and so-on.

Although I've read many books on the history of Cadillac, and although this book is not as thorough as others, I really enjoyed recounting Cadillac history with a different focus each time.

I gave this book a 4-star rating for its beautiful photography, interesting illustrations, and particularly for its novel approach to recounting the history of Cadillac. The fifth star is reserved for anyone who can match Thomas Bonsall's out-of-print "Cadillac: The American Standard", which is also available in more abbreviated and updated form as "Cadillac: The Postwar Years". These books represent the benchmark for the subject in my opinion.