American Motors Corporation: The Rise and Fall of America's Last Independent Automaker Hardcover – November 25, 2013

Foster's book offers a good write-up on the history of AMC from the beginning to the dismal end. Foster covers the history of AMC from the perspective of an insider and with many great photographs of AMC's lesser and more well-known offerings such as the Ambassador, Hornet, Gremlin, and Pacer. Of special interest are the many pictures of one-offs and prototype vehicles from the author's collection. One gripe--even though the '68-'70 AMX and Javelin and '71-'74 AMX/Javelin garner a fair amount of coverage in the text (as well they should being AMC's most revered muscle cars) there is hardly any mention of the '77-'80 Hornet/Concord/Spirit AMX. Granted, the later '77-'80 versions of the AMX were more focused on "visual excitement" (tape stripes and flashy decals) than actual usable road-going performance the later iterations of AMX really deserved more attention than they were given in Foster's book. After all, the later examples of the AMX were AMC's last attempt in its history to grab some of the performance market (when the performance market was made up of only the similar kind of tape and decal performance of the '75 to '80 Trans-Am and the more expensive, but lazy, Corvette) to boost its flagging sales using platforms that were decades old.Even though AMC was perennially short of cash it was able to compete with the "BigThree" auto manufacturers given the company's innovative approach to manufacturing and marketing. One thing that is immediately evident as one reads Foster's history of AMC is that tiny AMC was a very creative company whose boldness in the marketplace sometimes came back to bite the company in the butt. But, even so, AMC deserved better than what it received. It's a shame that AMC is gone. Having owned a number of Javelin's and AMX's in past years (and they were very good cars), trust me, it is a real shame that AMC is no more.

It's a demi - coffee table book, very well illustrated. Included are a number of images of styling studies showing what American Motors might have produced were the firm better financed.The text strikes me as authoritative. It was interesting to learn how close AMC came to leaving the automobile industry a very few years after the company was formed, just before the sales boom in compact cars such as the Rambler American.My quibble has to do with image captions. Here punches are pulled in that the styling of many concept and production cars is described as beautiful or something synonymous. We're in the realm of opinion here, but I thought many of those designs were mediocre. What got my particular goat was the qualtity of those enthusiastic caption blurbs that contrasted with the more measured basic text.All said, the book is a useful addition to my collection.

This book offers little that the author didn’t cover in his 1993 book on AMC. There are some new pictures of styling exercises that never became production models but little else is new.The publisher follows the current trend in books about cars which is to take old material and recycle it in a coffee table book format with large pages, lots of white space, large pictures, wide line spacing, a thin typeface, and a lower total word count. It is different from the old textbook style format but not an improvement.This book is death by paragraph. Data, like the composition of sales by model in a given year, is presented in several sentences rather than being presented as part of a multiyear table. The text should refer to and highlight parts of tables rather than standing alone. Endless text discussing minor year to year changes in things like grills and hubcaps fill the book and add little to the story.

Mostly good color pictures of AMC cars. Some pictures are a little blury, like low resolution jpegs or something. But this is not really a big deal. Nice material covering concept cars. Only thing I personally would have added to this book would be some coverage of the print advertising for these cars to see how they sold them in each decade. Good book for an AMC fan.

Patrick Foster tells the history of AMC with many original photos. The business decisions that caused the demise of the company are presented with insider info. Good book!

Lots of insight into AMC.: The products, management, and staff. Trials and tribulations of a small manufacturer. Illustrations are excellent. Great resource as an argument settler.

the information is very interesting and gives a wonderful perspective of the happenings of this great Americancompany. they made Jeep what it is today as well, and sad it evolved into Mopar and FIAT and the Iconic Jeep is now owned by a Foreign company. Should have been the other way around. Excellent book and great reference info as well.

Okay book but I expected more.Some experimental cars shown but oddly not as many photos of the production models as one might expect.Not as good as some of the other Patrick Foster automotive books.

Although I enjoyed reading this book, and the story of AMC is extremely interesting, I did think it could have been quite a lot better.Much of it reads like a dry company annual report. The text in each section is continuous instead of being broken down into subsections. Too much of it is repetitive longhand description of profit and loss, turnover, wholesale and retail sales etc. for every single year of the company history (from 1954 to 1987) that would've been better as tables, with highlights in the main text.What's really lacking is insight about the cars themselves. There are very few technical details and no proper critical comment. Fair enough, this was written by an enthusiast, though one with rose-tinted specs, but what the author says about the cars is often simplistic and sometimes absurd. He describes the Renault Alliance as a 'truly remarkable car' several times, but history tells it was really a pretty ordinary car and in many ways a mediocre one. The author fails to even mention that it was based on the European Renault 9, just as he fails to mention the Renault Le Car was based on the Renault 5. Another example is that there's no mention at all of the Pacer's most interesting feature – its unequal length doors. How could you talk about that car and not mention that?The gestation of the US-designed cars isn't that well described. The Pacer's introduction, a significant chapter in AMC's history, is just slipped in among the financial figures for the year, almost as an aside. Significant new models should have been given their own defined sections. A new edition of the book could be vastly better by doing this and keeping the cars separate from the financial and political stuff.I found the number of typos in the text distracting.And yet, there's nothing else quite like this book, and there are two redeeming features that make it worth getting if you're into this subject. One is that the author is an AMC insider, so he knows a lot about the people who ran the company over the years. The other is that there are some really good photos. Most of them seem to be culled from brochure shots, but there are quite a few previously unseen shots of prototypes and rare models. The book is large and glossy and colourful.But it needs redoing. It needs an editor who can turn it from a good book into a great one.

Already reviewed.

Great Book with loads of new photographs not seen before. If you want to know the history of AMC this is the book to buy.

Perfect

Rating: 5 starsI've always been fond of the last survivors of the once numerous American independent auto brands and this volume brings together Nash, Hudson, then Kaiser-Jeep, then Renault and , finally, the purchase by Chrysler which marked the end of American Motors. The book apears to be meticulously researched and contains the kind o details that are fascinating to non-industry insiders. There are plenty of good pictures to support the chronological treatment so that it's possible to follow the different mofels from one year to the next, with textual information on changes to their appearance, equipment and specifications.This is not a book for the average reader nor is it really a coffee table book. There are plenty of photos, to be sure, but this is a story to be read and enjoyed, even those details of the years in which the company seemed to make bad decisions and lose its way. I enjoyed the book for its insights into what makes the American auto industry tick, for its detailed treatment of the subject, for its informed opinions on the personalities behind the cars and the company, and for its comprehensive coverage of the cars that made up American Motors.I recommend this book to anyone interested in American automobile history, especially to fans of Hudson, Nash, Jeep and AMC. It's an excellent book at a very reasonable price and it should be on every car guy's bookshelf.