Ford Reviews

While a useful reference, this book is not as complete as I'd like. It's much too terse, and like most Chilton books uses the words "Assembly is the reverse of removal" a bit too often. The photographs are good but sometimes don't provide enough of a view to allow you to orient yourself -- which is especially important, given the restricted access to the engine in these vans.

Additionally, large amounts of space are taken up by boilerplate information such as tips on jacking that is not edited to be specifically relevent to Ford vans.

Maybe I was spoiled by the excellent service manual I had for my previous van (a 1975 VW), but altogether I was hoping for more from this book.

I thought this book would give revolutionary ideas on how to use object-oriented techniques to help my day-to-day programming life, but I was badly mistaken. There is only a few chapters on actual object-oriented programming but it does not use real world examples. The rest of the book is a badly written explanation of Delphi, which there are several other books which explain it much better.

I purchased this book to make repairs on my 1995 T-Bird 4.6l dohc V8. The book has a section dedicated to this engine But in many areas it is very Vague. This is a complicated engine and more detail needs to be illustrated on things such as valve timing, as well as component placing, and how to's.

Needless to say, I was very disappointed in my purchase.

Ron

One of the difficulties in producing a book of this nature is the fact that it is mostly viewed by specialist car buffs, most of whom have their own area of expertise. ie, T, A, early V8, post war etc. and know their facts. Unfortunately Mike Mueller in his bid to get this on the shelves has given cursory coverage to some of the most influential periods of Ford history. The Model A for instance is probably the most collected classic car but only warrants a few illustrations, one of wrongly labled RHD 1930 sedan and a poor restoration of a 1928 Tudor sporting the wrong wheels. Given Mike's photographic ability is it too much to ask to find a decent example of an A and give it the photo it deserves? The early V8s are given little photographic coverage particularly the 1932, a milestone car, the first V8.
If you are going to tackle a book of this nature you need to take your time, get your facts right and try and achieve a sense of balance. Too many authors make the mistake of taking lots of photos of later model cars in an effort to fill the pages.To his credit some of the photography is superb
Having waited eagerly for the arrival of this book I finished my read with a sense of disappointment.

This is NOT a book for most parents. This is for parents who feel that they must put their child on a strict schedule no matter what their needs are. Ford implies that any deviation from her schedule will result in failure (as many of her "scenarios" show). She also makes it clear that she believes only her method will result in a happy/contented baby. In addtion, the book implies that you cannot breastfeed successfully because you're almost guaranteed a low supply problem unless you follow her guidelines (which involve expressing milk & feeding from a bottle at night).

I can guarantee that this is not the only way to successfully raise a child...and I can also guarantee that you CAN breastfeed successfully without ever pumping or feeding from a bottle.

Some of the information in the last chapters of the book are useful, such as dealing with tantrums and potty training. But anything related to feeding & sleeping are presented as "absolutes" from which you cannot deviate for risk of failure.

If you choose to read this book or Ford's first book "The Contented Little Baby Book", please insert some common sense and listen to your baby/toddler. There ARE ways to have a routine (of sorts at least) without resorting to "controlled crying" and waking baby out of a sound sleep at specific times. In addition, there are other authors out there presenting similar parenting methods who at least give you the option to customize the plan to meet their family's needs.

In theory, who wouldn't want to read the memoirs of a former Commissioner of Major League Baseball? Especially those of Ford Frick (1949-1964), who also put in a number of years as sportswriter, Babe Ruth's ghostwriter, and President of the National League.

Frick wrote in 1972, a watershed year for baseball. Labor strife was on the rise -- baseball experienced its first work stoppage -- but the owners had won a big victory by turning Curt Flood's challenge of the reserve clause, and certainly no-one expected free agency to impact the game as much as it did. The designated hitter was still in the future, as was the utter elimination of daytime World Series games. There was no interleague play, no international baseball, no George Steinbrenner. In that sense you can read his book as the last of the "old guard": Commissioners are now executives working on behalf of the owners, a job description not held by Frick.

"Games, Asterisks, and People" is not a biography, however. Frick mostly wrote grandiose statements about baseball's future, and we learn very little of Frick's career, except that which the reader presumably knows going in. What few personal anecdotes there are are usually told anonymously. Even though the word "asterisk" is in the title of the book -- an allusion to Frick's ruling which denied, for many years, sole status to Roger Maris as baseball's single-season Home Run king -- Frick devotes merely one peevish page to brushing off complaints. "No asterisks, no apologies," he states. Certainly no apologies to Maris.

When Frick talks about what he sees as the future of baseball, he's fairly good at predicting details. When he names cities he thinks are ripe for expansion, he correctly identifies Toronto, Phoenix, Miami, Seattle, and Denver. He narrowly avoids endorsing interleague play and the DH rule, both of which are here to stay.

Less prescient were Frick's gloom-and-doom predictions about TV money and the elimination of the reserve clause. Certainly he didn't see the rise of free agency or the astronomical salaries that resulted. He believed that the TV bubble will "burst", which turned out to be funny in retrospect (to be fair, there were 3 channels in Frick's day and 500 in Bud Selig's).

More poignantly, Frick seemed to realize that he was writing from a watershed moment, and that the old guard he represented was going to vanish forever. In that respect, most of his book is a glowing tribute to baseball from its rural mid-American roots, to the golden age of Cobb, Ruth, Johnson and Mathewson. It's a history of the sport told by one who loved the game practically from birth, speaking to an audience far removed from Frick's time. While his writing style is distant and dry, one can almost feel the urge to sit by Frick's armchair and listen to more stories about the old days, as told by a really distant uncle.

Frick served baseball for half a century, and during his time saw baseball evolve from Babe Ruth to Hank Aaron. If you draw a list of the 20 most influential non-players in baseball history, Frick is on your list. However, his memoirs are not a tribute to his legacy and certainly not as detailed as other biographies of that era ("Veeck as in Wreck", "Ball Four"). One day, Bud Selig will author a book of similar quality. If we're not lucky.

I purchased this book because I needed to figure out a problem with the heater on my 96 Ranger. This book proved to be of very little help.

There was only one diagram of the heater system with virtually no detail (page 3-9 diagram 3.11). The problem is with the heater vacuum system. This area is not even mentioned in this book.

So for me, this book was of virtually no value. Hopefully, I can come back in the future and say that I was able to use this book to fix a problem. However, I will probably have traded in my truck first.

Following the pattern of the "In a Weekend" books, this book is divided into a Friday night session followed by morning, afernoon and evening sessions for Saturday and Sunday. The author suggests a familiarity with HTML before undertaking this book and recommends "Learn HTML In a Weekend" by Steve Callihan (I've read the Mac edition). He then spends around thirty pages on a review of HTML. Among JavaScript topics covered are objects, strings, functions, controlling the browser status bar, and creating roll-over effects. Along the way you will leaarn to make a JavaScript "clock" and how to "bake" and check for a cookie. Surprisingly I don't think Mr. Ford ever makes a really convincing argument for the use of JavaScript. Add to that "typos" and the fact that the CD ROM won't work as advertised on the Mac (although it does seem to run with out incident on a PC) and you get the idea the book could have been better. Other issues I have with this book are: 1.A good case is made by the author for using Netscape Navigator along with this "course" with most of the examples illustrating Navigator but his "Nav" preference is not mentioned until later in the book. It would have been better to state this earlier. 2.Mr Ford says you should explicitly declare variables, but in most of his examples he does not. Finally, if the example set by the book he recommends ("...HTML In a Weekend") was followed--that of diagraming each command as it is introduced and walking the reader through each example this book would be less frustrating. All in all I think this book might be suited to a classroom enviroment where an instructor could answer questions and point out errors. You can learn some JavaScript from this book, but is more frustrating than it needs to be. I was disappointed.

While this book is enchanting in that it deals with a young girl wanting to see a movie that the world has told her is "wonderful" (which is debatable) it is disturbing to see people making it cute to try and ignore the teachings of the Church (founded by Jesus Christ) and decide for themselves (they think -- they are really putting the world ahead of Jesus) -- in other words we are supposed to find it cute that this girl can at this young age bludgeon the teachings of her faith to compromise with the world. Fine -- and what got us in our current mess? This book is OK for secular audiences but Christians of both branches should ignore it. There are better books out there.

I'm trying to buy a Repair Manual, could you please help me where I can buy this item?