FIREFLY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TRANSPORTATION

A visual history of transportation technology, from early wheels to the rover Curiosity.

Readers aren’t going to be carried very far by this ponderous assemblage of staid modern stock images and (here and there) photos paired to perfunctory notes on top speeds, uses, and the like. They are grouped by general type, with occasional changes of pace, such as a quick glance at some varieties of “greener” transport shoehorned in between the trains and aircraft. The pictures—most of them small, depicting vehicles unencumbered by visible drivers or crews, and monotonously pinned to pale, neutral-colored background grids—are laid into their arbitrarily ordered single-topic spreads without regard for relative scale or visual flow. Despite offering looks at a great array of wheeled, airborne, and nautical vehicles of the present as well as the past, the gallery is not only selective and stingy at best with action or cutaway views, but stale to boot. The newest fighter jet (an F-117, 1981 vintage), for example, was superseded in 2008; the latest model of electric auto mentioned outside the closing timeline is a 2010 Nissan Leaf; and the most recent space probe, Cassini-Huygens, was launched in 1997. Moreover, so Eurocentric is the viewpoint that only four of the 23 older types of sailing vessels on display are not European or North American.

An underpowered survey.