The kind of history no one writes anymore
David Halberstam wrote in 1986 his view of the history of the carmaking industry. He focuses on Ford and Nissan. Other players get mentions here and there, but no more than that. While a broader look at the whole carmaking industry might seem better, Halberstam's approach works.
No one writes this kind of history any more. Rather than lecture, Halberstam brings out details that tell the story themselves. He picks people and follows their careers, mistakes and successes, as they make their contribution to carmaking.
Halberstam does not do everything perfectly. His approach has its flaws. He will boil down someone's life to a few pages, or even paragraphs, which makes the complex more simple than it should be. And much of what he writes can only be speculation -- how is he to know what Henry Ford was thinking back in the early 1900s?
That said, this book captured my interest. Most books like this written 20 years ago are hard to get through. They are way past their shelf life.
Not so with this one. I picked it up because I'm interested in carmaking. I put it down admiring it not just for how it treats carmaking, but for how it treats history. Well worth reading.
ten stars
This book is a masterpiece of narrative journalism. Based on five years of research and interviews, it tells the story of how the Japanese came to dominate the American car industry by telling the stories of key individuals, in the U.S. and Japan, who played important roles in that story. Halberstam is such a skilled writer that every one of these people comes alive on the page; you will meet the Fords and their Japanese counterparts at Nissan, and executives, car designers, union leaders, and workers in both countries. Along the way, as you get to know these people, you will learn the story not only of the automobile industry but also of American business in general, the story of how American companies abandonned the making of quality products under pressure from finance people (trained at the nation's leading business schools) who care only about stock position and short-term profits. There can be no better primer for anyone who wants to understand the economic history of America in the second-half of the twentieth century. Read it and weep--and then take a look at Eamon Fingleton's "In Praise of Hard Industry" (also published under the title "Unsustainable").
Cars, egos, leadership, family, unions, and rises and falls ...
I'm really not into cars. However, I happened onto The Reckoning because of having read and liked earlier Halberstam books but ... and found it to be one of the best I have ever read, an absolutely great book. On more than one occasion, I have talked way too much about the remarkable stories it includes, way too long. The Ford:Nissan comparative history is a good mechanism, but the stories are the really great part - the totally hilarious (the salesman in the Port of LA changing the nameplates, trying to explain about the brakes and the engine blankets to the Japanese engineers); the absolutely tragic (Ford and his son, Edsel); the truly remarkable (the business dream team after WWII, the family actions after Edsel's death), the bizarre (pulling the chassis through a barn with a rope and measuring the elapsed time, any color as long as it's black) etc., etc. Lots of car and manufacturing and labor relations stuff, but a really readable book for anyone. And I am truly not into cars ...
A wonderful book
The Reckoning is a wonderful book that shows how the United States lost its dominance in the automobile industry. In true Halberstam fashion MacNamara is one of the main villains but through stunning research Halberstam paints a very clear picture of what happened. Japans attention to detail and innovation overshadow America's downfall. The big three are unable to respond and those who are running the Japanese business in the United States who were far more inventive. This book is still relevant even in today's world.
Relevant even today
If "The Reckoning" is not a classic then certainly it is an authoritative account of Nissan's assault on the U.S. market (and Ford's subsequent demise). The account of the Big Three's arrogance has been told many times since Halberstam published this book, but Halberstam deserves a lot of credit for so much of his book being so relevant to what American automakers are facing today. Insert big SUVs and big trucks any time Halberstam talks about Big Cars = Big Profits and you've got a pretty good idea of what's going on today with Ford and GM and their reluctance to come out with small, fuel-efficient vehicles in favor of high-margin SUVs. It is necessary to point out, though, that even though American auto executives were truly arrogant and complacent with their market share, Japanese manufacturing (lean production) was a paradigm shift. In order to compete on quality with the Japanese American auto would have had to spend billions of dollars on new plants and capital equipment (in essence, almost "betting the farm" that Demings' TQM was the wave of the future). The Japanese had the distinct advantage of having to start from scratch.
(21 reviews)
