The Song Behind Today’s Review Title
Set your wayback machine to the 1950s for today’s book. It’s all about the cars of that time, and growing up in southeastern Michigan in the 1950s and 1960s.
Way back in 1955 a singer-songwriter by the name of Charlie Ryan penned a rockabilly tune about a hot rod race. The race is between a souped up Lincoln and the hot rod Cadillac the Lincoln driver tries to pass. The song is called Hot Rod Lincoln.
Today’s book is autobiographical and also a history of America’s car culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Hot rods are just one of the many automotive topics the author covers, but the lyric that is today’s title captures some of the youthful joy and innocent nostalgia the author conveys in his book.
There were other artists who covered Ryan’s song, and the most successful cover was the 1971 version by the country-rock band Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. That version hit #9 on Billboards Hot 100 in the US and also charted in Australia and Canada. You can listen to their version of the song, and see some neat period-appropriate visuals in this YouTube video from Radial by The Orchard.
Today’s book will be very popular, I am sure, with any Baby Boomer male who ever had an interest in cars or “car culture”. The book is a biography of the author’s youth, mostly in Jackson, Michigan, and a walk through American automotive history of the 1950s and 1960s.
I grew up in Michigan and was born near the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation. I love history but I would never have been considered a “motorhead”, though many of my friends growing up were. Even so I found this book fascinating and a lot of fun to read.
Lankton touches on everything automobile related in post-war midcentury America. Competition among car manufacturers and the planned obsolescence of the model year change over. Building model cars or participating in a soap box derby as a kid. California car culture and the emergence of hot rods. Bumper cars and thrill shows. Drag racing and Indy car racing. Songs about cars (including “Hot Rod Lincoln”). Family road trips. Automobile safety (or the lack of it), and the films shown in driver education classes that highlighted gory car crashes of accident prone youths. The nostalgia for those post-war automobiles that still drive Boomers to visit the Henry Ford Museum to this day. Even the 1973 movie American Graffiti (set in 1962) gets discussed.
Author and former professor Larry Lankton sits in a coney dog restaurant in Jackson, Michigan. (Photo credit: David Lawrence, photo source: https://blogs.mtu.edu/sciences-arts/2026/08/motor-city-boomer-mtu-professor-emeritus-larry-lankton-celebrates-car-culture-in-his-latest-book/)
The book’s author is retired Michigan Tech professor Larry Lankton. Lankton is likely best known to readers for his histories of Michigan’s copper mining days. Beyond the Boundaries and Cradle to Grave are probably his best known books, at least to me, and in my neck of the woods - which happens to be the historic center of that copper mining activity. (I became familiar with these books through my volunteer work with the local historical society.) While those past books are aimed at relatively niche audiences that certainly isn’t the case with Motor City Boomer.
What I didn’t know about Lankton, despite being familiar with his past books, is that he previously had worked as a curator at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, and that while he was a professor at Michigan Tech he introduced and taught a course called The Automobile in America. His love for and knowledge of automobiles is genuine and long-lasting, and he’s poured all of it into this book. It’s become my favorite biography of the year.
RATING: Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
OVERALL COMMENTS: Lankton’s Motor City Boomer will appeal to any Boomer male who ever had an interest in cars or car culture. It has become my favorite biography of the year.
I GOT MY COPY: I received an advanced reviewer’s copy of the book through Edelweiss, and courtesy of the publisher Wayne State University Press. The book is available to the public starting today, August 18, 2026.
Title: Motor City Boomer: The Car Culture that Defined a Generation
Author: Larry Lankton
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publish Date: August 18, 2026
ISBN-13: 9780814353448
Publisher’s List Price: $32.99 trade paper book
Other Books and Stuff
CURRENT BOOKS & STUFF
No other new books this week. We did go see a play though - the musical Book of Mormon at the beautiful Glasshouse Theatre. The theatre is practically brand new — it just opened in March of this year. The play, on the other hand, is now an oldie, having debuted back in 2011 — 15 years ago.
With music, lyrics and book by the team behind South Park the play was controversial when it was first performed. It’s irreverent treatment of the distinctly American religion, profanity, brief (and pretty prudish) nudity, inclusion of an openly gay character, and nonstop swear words all made it an invitation to controversy back then — which I am confident the South Park boys expected, and which I am certain helped sell tickets.
This was our second viewing of the play. (We first saw it in Chicago sometime in the 20-teens.) The brief nudity was dispensed with in this performance, and Jeffrey Epstein made an appearance in the dream of hell in the second half of the play (replacing Jeffery Dahmer’s appearance in the original). Those were the differences we noticed. Otherwise it was just as memorable and hilarious as the first viewing. I am amazed at how well the leads in the mostly Australian cast carried off their American accents. Are we really that easy to imitate?
Exterior view of the new Glasshouse Theatre, part of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) complex. (Photo source: https://www.aussietheatre.com.au/news/qpac-announces-opening-of-new-glasshouse-theatre/)
WHAT’S NEXT
Next week I’ll be reviewing The Madman in the White House. Despite the title this is not a book about our current President. It is instead about a “lost psychobiography” of President Woodrow Wilson. Here is the publisher’s description:
The notorious psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, rediscovered nearly a century after it was written by Sigmund Freud and US diplomat William C. Bullitt, sheds new light on how the mental health of a controversial American president shaped world events.
When the fate of millions rests on the decisions of a mentally compromised leader, what can one person do? Disillusioned by President Woodrow Wilson’s destructive and irrational handling of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt asked this very question. With the help of his friend Sigmund Freud, Bullitt set out to write a psychological analysis of the president. He gathered material from personal archives and interviewed members of Wilson’s inner circle. In The Madman in the White House, Patrick Weil resurrects this forgotten portrait of a troubled president.
After two years of collaboration, Bullitt and Freud signed off on a manuscript in April 1932. But the book was not published until 1966, nearly thirty years after Freud’s death and only months before Bullitt’s. The published edition was heavily redacted, and by the time it was released, the mystique of psychoanalysis had waned in popular culture and Wilson’s legacy was unassailable. The psychological study was panned by critics, and Freud’s descendants denied his involvement in the project.
For nearly a century, the mysterious, original Bullitt and Freud manuscript remained hidden from the public. Then in 2014, while browsing the archives of Yale University, Weil happened upon the text. Based on his reading of the 1932 manuscript, Weil examines the significance of Bullitt and Freud’s findings and offers a major reassessment of the notorious psychobiography. The result is a powerful warning about the influence a single unbalanced personality can have on the course of history.
