Author: Mitch Kruse (With Derek Williams)
ISBN:-13:  978-1-935391-31-9

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Ah…the classics.  I, for one, love the Plymouth Fury (yes, Christine), but the Bugatti Royale was also one of the most prestigious and exquisite automobiles of its time.

We begin our story with that gorgeous car.  Only seven were ever produced in the small French town of Molsheim.  The body of this magnificent vehicle weighed seven hundred pounds, with a three hundred horsepower engine that was truly unheard of in 1933 when they were made.  Briggs Cunningham walks through the basically-abandoned Bugatti Estate and is shown around by Ettore Bugatti’s descendant.  Upon entering a beautiful den, he makes sure that the descendant is happy with his payment, smiles at her, picks up a sledgehammer, and smashes it into the wall…unveiling the two missing Bugatti Royales that’d been hidden by their maker a long time ago.  Briggs builds race cars and can’t wait to bring the Royales back to life.

From here we are taken into the author’s life.  Dad was an auctioneer - a rather famous one.  He was so good at what he did that he could sell anything from aircraft to high-rises and broke many world records in the process.  His fast talk and vast knowledge got him the best prices in the industry.  The author comes from a long line of auctioneers.  In fact, his grandfather was inducted into the Indiana Auctioneers Association Hall of Fame, so it wasn’t a surprise that he, too, joined the family business.  In his own words he said that when he smashed the gavel, and screamed out SOLD! that he literally felt like a rock star.

Now we come to the “falling apart” phase of life, where the IRS comes into the family business and tears down all that they’d built throughout their lives.  From the tear-down came realization; the realization that all of us are simply clay in God’s hands.  The true Restorer is the one who can shape us and mold us into the people we can ultimately be.  Lives of pretense, says the author, keep us un-restored.  And it takes years, and the hand of God, to make us authentic once again.  There are many good points in this non-fiction look at the struggles we go through in our lives.  And I, for one, agree with the author on many of them.  The biggest and most personal for me is the idea that the pursuit of wisdom and not money is the way to go - the way to make ourselves better people so that we can one day walk into the afterlife and meet the real Restorer and offer Him our thanks.  Well written without being too “preachy,” the authors have done a fine job offering words of guidance to a world that’s teetering on the edge of faith.

 Click Here To Purchase Restoration Road