Book Feature: Cranswick on Porsche
By Marc Cranswick
ISBN: 978 1 787114 83 8
£40.00
Veloce Publishing – www.veloce.co.uk
I have never made any secret about being a Porschephile; I love the German sportscar brand and have been fortunate enough to have experienced almost every model the company has produced. Marc Cranswick’s book deals mostly with the air-cooled period of its existence, which encompasses the period from its inception, through 27 years of confounding its critics, a factor that will be most pleasing to those readers believing that water-cooled Porsches are ‘devil’s spawn’. Yet, the author is smart enough to incorporate the front-engined impetus and water-cooled developments, as he journeys through the marque’s history. As motorsport has played a vital role in growing the brand, a healthy slice of the book’s content deals with both the better known and some of the more obscure races entered by the company. It is a quirky title, with 240pp of well written text and more than 300 pictures and illustrations, some of which came from the hands of the author. Yet, it is abundantly clear that in trying to write a book for an international audience, Marc cannot disguise completely his Americanisms. Read past them and the boundless enthusiasm he displays is remarkably infectious. The content is all there but much of it is compiled in an anecdotal manner, sometimes even like a ‘stream of consciousness’, almost as if the author’s passion cannot be contained. The sliver of detail on Porsche’s rallying exploits is a rich seam that could have been explored more deeply, except that North Americans do not really have a handle on the discipline. Yet, there have been so many Porsche related titles over the years that this one earns its bookshelf slot more for its alternative slant than shimmying past the details. I really enjoyed reading it.
