An authoritative contribution to business and automotive history.
The fate of a company too big to fail.
By the 1960s, General Motors was a respected automaker, producing more than half the cars in the U.S.; in 2009, it begged for a bailout along with Ford and Chrysler. In an adroit, thoroughly researched history, biographer and telecommunications executive Whyte focuses on GM as exemplary of pressures that led to an economic decline in the 1970s and continue to shape the economy. As the author demonstrates, GM was undermined by an influx of foreign competition; a sudden surge in oil prices in 1973, which led Americans to abandon big cars; and, emphatically, a crusading reform movement that swept up lawyers, congressmen, and consumers and demonized big business. Prominent among the reformers was Ralph Nader, “a secular, twentieth-century Puritan” deeply influenced by critics of capitalism such as C. Wright Mills, Vance Packard, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Bolstering congressional investigations into auto safety, Nader underscored manufacturers’ culpability for negligent car design and for marketing “speed and aggression.” With 40,000 people killed annually in traffic accidents, Nader rejected the notion that education of drivers, enforcement of laws, and engineering of roadways were adequate responses. When his exposé Unsafe at Any Speed was published in 1965, the San Francisco Chronicle called it “a searing document that may become the Silent Spring of the automotive industry.” Far-reaching changes followed. By 1975, all states had consumer protection agencies; tort law penalized manufacturers for hazards even if they were not caused by negligence; and businesses like GM were portrayed as “villains, enemies of the public good.” Whyte argues persuasively against assuming “the altruism of crusaders and reformers,” some of whom are intent on “assigning blame and sacking rich targets.” The constant warfare between the bringers of private goods and the champions of public goods, Whyte warns, “is self-defeating for liberalism” as well as for a thriving economy.
An authoritative contribution to business and automotive history.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-52167-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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