"This is a captivating story of fascinating personalities, unexpected deals, colorful clients, and unforeseen experiences. A story well told, it's a book that, once started, is hard to put down." — Ferrari Club of America Magazine
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“As a former long-time resident of the Los Gatos area I spent a lot of time hanging out at Ferrari of Los Gatos and I even bought and sold a few cars there. This terrific book provides the fascinating history that I did not know behind the legendary dealership in a very entertaining way.” – Mike Gulett, founder of My Car Quest
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“I knew Richard Rivoir and Brian Burnett over the years and their story is worthy of sharing.”–Bruce Meyer, The Car Guy's Car Guy
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NetGalley Review: 4 stars
Last updated on 08 Jun 2022
""The Dealer: How One California Dealership Fueled The Rise of Ferrari's Cars In America" is a slim and quick read written by Jim Ciardella to be published under the Prometheus imprint. I am most grateful to the publishers for providing me with an ARC for review. I found this book charming, taken on its own terms. The subject is a famously successful Ferrari franchise in the United States and its twenty year history of successful innovation. The narrative is anecdotal in nature, but the author achieves his purpose principally through his access to the colorful characters who populated this story. Everything from entrepreneurs and eccentric clients to Enzo Ferrari himself keep things moving along. I have a very personal reason for being drawn to this tale, and that is that my father was a successful car salesman for most of his life, and as a consequence of this I grew up around the colorful characters that populated many of the dealerships my father worked at. Nothing in this book surprised me, but much of it delighted me in that the tale (tragic in some ways) is told with humor, compassion and an understanding that most people are not immersed in the inner workings of automobile dealerships as they existed pre-Covid. Nonetheless, the author is skilled at drawing his tale out without submersing us in unintelligible economic or mechanical details. This is a story of wheelers and dealers at a boom time in the history of the internal combustion engine. Many of us lived this on the periphery as we grew up and became fascinated with cars. This book is a sort of loving homage to them."—William Harris, consumer reviewer
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