Home > Media > Books > Karen Axelrod and Bruce Brumberg - Watch It Made in the U.s.a.: A Visitor's Guide to the Companies That Make Your Favorite Products
Karen Axelrod and Bruce Brumberg - Watch It Made in the U.s.a.: A Visitor's Guide to the Companies That Make Your Favorite Products
Factor in Some of These Tours When You Travel the USA
Written: Sep 03 '09
Product Rating:
Pros: may point folks to places they wouldn't otherwise visit, indexes are useful, information seems accurate
Cons: too general, choice of tours and museums sometimes a bit odd, organizational issues
The Bottom Line: Treat this book as one of several vacation planning tools and don't expect it to tell you about all of the best factory tours in the United States.
quasar's Full Review: Karen Axelrod and Bruce Brumberg - Watch It Made i...
I love seeing how things work. Whether it's taking something apart and putting it back together again or visiting a factory and seeing how commercial items are made, I find the process fascinating. When I stumbled on Watch It Made in the U.S.A.: A Visitor's Guide to the Best Factory Tours and Company Museums by Karen Axelrod and Bruce Brumberg, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Unfortunately, the book fails to live up to its potential.
The book starts with 22 featured tours then goes on to present places of interest on a region-by-region basis for the rest of the book, starting with New England and working its way roughly south then west across the country. The featured tours are also included in the regular listings and, in an unforgiveable bout of laziness, the content is repeated word for word in both spots. The only difference is the inclusion of a few pictures under the featured tour listing; regular listings in the book do not typically include graphics (two or three entries have a couple of black and white photographs; it's unclear how these listings were selected for the honor).
The book uses fairly standard geographic regions and further divides its contents by state, but makes no effort to organize the book into sets of nearby attractions or by type of product produced or by any other noticeable method likely to be used by actual travelers. You might move from a shoe factory in Philadelphia to a history museum in Pittsburgh back to a pretzel factory tour in the Lancaster region. The list of nearby attractions mitigates this a bit, but those listings do not include page numbers for any of the mentioned locations also in the book which is annoying. Better organization would have helped this book immensely.
Also contributing to the organizational woes is the book's very badly designed table of contents. While the table of contents adequately lists sections and has an entry for each of the included attractions, it doesn't include page numbers for them. Instead, it gives a page number for the start of each region and each state and leaves extrapolating further up to the reader. I have no idea why this ridiculous choice was made, but it truly makes no sense to me. If you aren't going to provide page numbers for direct access to the listed items, why bother listing them in the first place?
The book does include two indexes which are somewhat useful. The first lists entries alphabetically by company name so you can quickly determine if a particular company's factory tour is discussed in the book. The second index is grouped by type of product and lists the specific product or company name underneath its industry heading. If you're looking for tours of food production facilities, they're all listed together in one section of this index. Of course, you have to then go to the actual entries to determine where each place is located. A brief indication of state in the product index would have made it even more useful.
The listings are generally a single page long with two columns of tight text; the first column and sometime part of the second provide a brief description of the attraction as well as an overview of what it has to offer visitors. The rest of the space is given over to a series of brief informational snippets covering the basics of a visit including the cost, whether reservations are needed, how long they estimate a proper visit will take, if the attraction includes a film of any sort, information about the gift shop (if any), notes on disabled access, directions (usually from a single major highway), and an indication of other nearby attractions you might also want to visit (these may or may not be other factory tours). There is enough information to get a basic feel for a place and learn whether you want to learn more about it, but probably not enough to really satisfy a serious travel researcher and certainly not enough information to make the attractions come to life for the armchair traveler.
Although the subtitle of the book includes company museums, I'm a bit perplexed by the decisions made concerning what to include and what not to include in this book. Some of the museums included are not company-specific or even specific to a particular industry. Although both are fabulous museums, I have to wonder about the inclusion of the Hagley Museum in Delaware or the Heinz History Museum in Pittsburgh. Sure, the Hagley Museum has ties to the DuPont family and includes remnants of old DuPont business buildings, but it's really a look at the way people lived in a 19th Century factory town and not a company museum. Similarly, the Heinz History Museum is essentially a local history museum with a much broader focus than Heinz food products (it does include one exhibit on Heinz labels and advertising, but the exhibit consumes a small portion of one floor). There are several other entries that make me go "hmmm" - almost all for fantastic places I strongly recommend visiting but that do not seem to fit the scope of this particular book.
The information provided for each location seems accurate and up to date; I don't see any mistakes for those places I've visited in the past. I specifically checked the entries for the Snyder Pretzel Factory in Hanover, Pennsylvania and the United States Mint in Philadelphia because both have had significant changes over the past five years. The Snyder Pretzel Factory actually closed to the public for several years but was reopened shortly before this edition was published. Similarly, the US Mint had restricted entry for several years - advanced arrangements by a member of congress was required for all visits - but has reverted to its original open door, free to the public tours as long as security alerts are not in place. The entries for both of these locations were updated to reflect their current status (or, as the cynic in me believes, they were incorrect for some time while both locations were closed to the general public and are only correct now because the new policies are identical to those in place prior to the closings).
If you like factory tours or industrial museums or history museums with some focus on industry, Watch It Made in the U.S.A.: A Visitor's Guide to the Best Factory Tours and Company Museums may point you toward some attractions you wouldn't otherwise know to visit. However, it's a bit too general for my taste and it has some serious organizational issues that make it difficult to use as a travel planning tool. If you do get the book, treat it as one of several vacation planning tools and do not expect it to tell you everything you ever wanted to know about all of the best factory tours in the United States.
Have you ever wondered how toothpaste gets into the tube? How stripes get on a candy cane? More than just a travel guide, Watch It Made in the U.S.A. ...More at Buy.com
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