Auto Mechanics

Auto Mechanics provides a superbly researched, engaging look into the profession that's near and dear to us all. -- John Lypen Motor Magazine 2007 Borg's own work in the repair shop infuses the study with insights that I am sure would escape anyone without the experience he has had... His questions are anything but academic. -- Steve Thompson AutoWeek 2007 He's... provided a source of inspiration to those who would like to work to improve the industry's image, recruitment and retention. -- Steve Relyea Import Automotive Parts & Accessories 2008 This is an excellent work that has much to contribute to our understanding of the automobile, technology, and wider trends in American history. -- Amy Gangloff Michigan Historical Review 2008 In seven richly detailed chapters, theoretically sophisticated and attentive to nuances of race, class, and gender, Borg analyzes the changing background, training, and expertise of auto mechanics over the course of the twentieth century. -- Joseph J. Corn Technology and Culture 2008 A wonderfully insightful study of the emergence and evolution of a contingent occupation and the meaning that that position had on both the people who did the work and those who procured the workers' services. -- Lisa M. Fine Labor History 2008 Auto Mechanics is an important contribution to U.S. labor and economic history and to our understanding of the ways that the mass production of automobiles changed working life. -- Andrew E. Kersten Journal of American History 2008 Well-written and well-researched... will be read with interest by all scholars of modern America. -- David Blanke Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 2007 Auto Mechanics sheds new light on the history of the automobile that top-down and bottom-up studies alike have missed. Call it a 'history from the middle-out,' if you will. -- Walter L. Elden IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 2008 Kevin Borg's Auto Mechanics is a finely researched, rich social history. -- Thomas A. Castillo Enterprise and Society 2008 Borg's Auto Mechanics will strongly appeal not only to those with an interest in this particular group, but also more generally to scholars working on the connections among material culture, labor, and the history of technology. -- Robert Buerglener American Quarterly 2008 Borg's history of technology, expert knowledge, training, recruitment, and reproduction of social inequality is elegantly crafted and seamlessly narrated... Given the centrality of the rise of the automobile to 20th-century American history, his book could be taught to undergraduate or graduate students in courses on sociology and the history of technology, as well as courses focused on industrialization, labor, or gender. -- Karla A. Erickson Work and Occupations 2008 Borg's careful attention to issues of race and gender, and his ability to draw connections between larger social movements and technological change makes Auto Mechanics a valuable contribution to a new generation of scholarship on the automobile, one that marries social history and the history of technology. -- Kathleen Franz Journal of Social History 2010