Parts of the book took a long time to read, since (for me, at least) it can be hard to digest the details about the really early tractors.  Titan 10-20s, Mogul 10-20s, Mogul 8-16s, International 8-16s...I don't have any experience with the real antiques like that, and so it's hard for me to keep them straight when I'm reading about them.  Guy's text is well-written; there's just a lot of detail there. 

The chapters about the newer stuff, like the Letter Series Farmalls, were easier--still had lots of good detail, but there I had some frame of reference.  Lots of really interesting photos of the many prototypes and predecessors to the H and M--some really beautiful tractors, and some, as Guy says in one caption, "plug ugly" ones.  (Plus a simply terrific full-color cover photo of an experimental Super M). 

There's also some neat stuff about the patent-infringement concerns IH and Allis had, concerning the Allis B (which was first, and patented) and the Farmall A (which was second).  Great reading--really added some depth and understanding to the story. 

I did have one disappointment:  In the chapter on post-WWII development, Guy has a section titled "The Great Transmission Chase," which begins, "The mid-1950s saw an enormous amount of IH farm tractor engineer attention going into transmissions and draft control."  The following text gets into planetary gearsets, torque converters, hydrostatics, and even more unusual stuff, which is fine--but I'd hoped for some insight into the reasons for and nature of the 560's transmission problems, and maybe some details of the corporate thinking behind the decision not to adopt the 3-point hitch. 

Guy's book is about experimentals and new developments, and perhaps the trouble with the 560 was that there _wasn't_ much experimentation or new development, so the book may cover the right stuff.  But the 560 seems to me to have been a very significant tractor for IH, in terms of the IH/John Deere relationship, and I was hoping to read more about it. 

But that quibbling aside, Guy's writing, illustration, and editing are all very good, and this book is a definite keeper. 

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It covers everything from the earliest gas-engined IH tractors up to the Case/IH merger in the 80s, including the Titans and Moguls, all the standard-tread and row-crop tractors, all the crawlers, and the Cubs and Cadets.  There's a brief description of each model, with some basic specs and production figures, but the focus is more on tractor development than on providing shop-manual kind of information. 

There are lots of black-and-white archival photos, most of them very interesting and amazingly clear, but (somewhat contrary to the title) there's also plenty of text.  It's all history--no stories about people riding around on their restored F-20s or Ms or whatever--and it's much more detailed than that in Wendel's 150 Years of IH. 

Some of the really early stuff is a bit confusing, but I'm not sure it could have been done much better.  The historical record itself from 80 years ago is probably a bit thin, and the tractor naming conventions from back then can take a while to sort through. 

There are a fair number of minor typos and awkwardly-worded sentences, but not enough to really take away from the usefulness or enjoyability of the book.  All in all it's the best history of IH tractors that I've seen, and I recommend it to all IH fans. 

It's published by Motorbooks International, 800-826-6600, for about $20.  (One odd note about the Motorbooks catalog:  It says this book covers "implements" and "the McCormick-Deering product lines of harvesters from the 1800s," but that's not really the case.  There's a little bit of introductory stuff on reapers and the McCormick Deering merger, but this book is about twentieth-century tractors, not implements or nineteenth-century harvesters.) 

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• There are good descriptions of a lot of basic farm tasks--plowing, planting, threshing, etc.  My own farm roots being somewhat on the lightweight side, I enjoyed seeing some things I could relate to and quite a few that I never experienced.

• I never quite got comfortable with the book's structure.  Judging by the title, I'd expected more emphasis on modern family farm life and less on history.  There were some good parts about people that are farming today, but they were scattered through the book and not particularly well linked to photos, so I didn't get as complete a picture of them I'd have liked.

• I was a bit disappointed with the photos.  There's a mix of old black and whites and new color ones, weighted fairly heavily towards the old ones.  Some of them show some really interesting stuff, but a bunch I thought were pointless.  A woman with little chicks, kids in the creek...I'd much rather have seen good color photos of real people who are doing that stuff today.

• There were also enough editing and formatting errors to annoy me-- text that doesn't flow smoothly from one page to the next, some photos being about 20 pages away from the corresponding text, etc.  For a $30 hardcover book, you shouldn't have to fight with it.

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