Recipes for Car Care: Guide to Auto Health
by Kathleen E. Casagrande

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Book Reviews of Recipes for Car Care: Guide to Auto Health

Book Review: Yes!
Summary: 5 Stars

All I knew before reading this was how to open the hood (and you don't even need to know that--it tells you how.) Now I can scan the mechanics' sights on the internet and see terms like "EGR system" and "oxygen sensor" and not even blink an eye--I know what they are and what they do and it actually makes sense!

The best feature of this book is definitely the way it's written. The author doesn't use analogies to other machines that you don't understand either. She compares different car parts to everyday things like rolling pins and tuna cans to help you understand what they look like and what they do. It makes things infinitely less intimidating and easier to understand. Everything is explained step-by-step and system-by-system, and technical terms are introduced slowly enough that you can absorb them. (You definitely need to have enough patience to start reading at the beginning and work your way through, though, because she builds on previous explanations.)

There are also diagnosing sections in the book to help you figure out what's wrong with a sick car and a maintenance chart to give you an idea when to replace things before they break anyway and cause more expensive problems.

A couple of things this book didn't have that I wished it did were price estimates for commonly replaced parts, photographs of parts (it has drawings instead), and a guide on how to negotiate a good deal when buying a car. A good book to get for those features is Auto Upkeep: Basic Car Care. Auto Upkeep is more the kind of book you can flip through. It has a lot of little tips on diagnosing problems and car maintenance separated from the main text in little boxes. It isn't nearly as thorough in its explanations as Recipes.., though, and even though it has photographs that help a lot in locating parts, I think the drawings in Recipes are a lot more helpful in figuring out the big picture of how the parts actually work. In other words, Auto Upkeep makes a good supplement, but defintely get Recipes for Car Care if you want an excellent, understandable explanation of how cars function!

Summary of Recipes for Car Care: Guide to Auto Health

Repair Books

• Subjects > Professional & Technical > Automotive > Repair
• Transportation
• Engineering
• Education & Reference > Consumer Guides
• Science & Math > Technology