Reviews

As Ford Motor Company celebrates its centennial this year, expect to see a number of books on the venerable automaker. Historian Brinkley (The Unfinished Presidency) provides a complete warts-and-all history of Ford. While founder Henry Ford is remembered as an icon of American business, credited with the invention of the moving assembly line, $5-per-day wages for workers, and the introduction of the first car built for the masses, the Model T, he was also a dictatorial executive who was not above using force to control workers. Ford was also a prominent wartime pacifist even while his overseas operations built armaments for the German army. In the second half of the century, after Henry finally stepped aside, the company celebrated success with the Mustang and on racetracks, but by the early 1980s it was close to bankruptcy. A comeback late in the decade led to spectacular profits, and amid increasing consolidation in the industry, Ford bought high-line producers Jaguar, Land Rover, and Volvo. The company's future, the book notes, looks bright. Among many titles on Ford, the best is still Robert Lacey's Ford: The Men & the Machine. This exhaustively researched new work is a useful adjunct to Lacey's and brings the story up to date. (Index not seen.)-Eric C. Shoaf, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence, RI Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

A comprehensive and briskly paced account of the man, the machines, and the company that dramatically influenced the course of 20th-century America... highly readable and engrossing. ("BusinessWeek") History on a grand scale!... Sweeping, absorbing. (Robert Caro)

Two other histories of Ford are slated for publication this year; four were published last year. Brinkley, a University of New Orleans history professor, distinguishes his as the only "single volume business and social history of Ford Motor from 1903 to 2003." In fact, it's something different: a book about the people of Ford, including the Ford family, executives, workers, union organizers and others. Extensive new documentary materials tell Ford's story in the words of its people. Brinkley's focus never strays far from Ford plants in Highland Park, River Rouge and Willow Run, Mich., yet he reflects events taking place in the outside world through the actions and feelings of people in nearby Dearborn, Mich. This does for 20th-century history what Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 did for the prior era: relate world events from a fixed perspective on a human scale. For example, Brinkley infuses a discussion of Ford's design shift in the late 1950s with Henry Ford II's scandalous (for the time) pursuit of his European mistress. And he mentions the Korean War because it led to government-imposed production controls that prevented Ford from surpassing Chrysler in sales. Readers interested in the history of the Ford Motor Company can find accounts better-written (Robert Lacey's Ford: The Men and the Machine) and more authoritative (Allan Nevins's Ford, Companies and Men), but will value this book for its new details and quotes. For general readers, it's a fascinating epic saga of ordinary and extraordinary people who built a great company. (On sale Apr. 28) Forecast: The aforementioned books on Ford are out of print, so Brinkley's book could appeal to a new generation of business history readers. A plug from Robert Caro will help, too. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.