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 enlarge | Author: Douglas G. Brinkley
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 150255
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 880
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.7
ISBN: 0142004391
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.76292092
EAN: 9780142004395
ASIN: 0142004391
Publication Date: June 1, 2004
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| Customer Reviews:
 Packed with Knowledge! March 1, 2004
It would be difficult to conceive of a more detailed corporate history. Author Douglas Brinkley offers an interesting, lucid narrative of Henry Ford's early experiments with the automobile, and his first, unsuccessful companies. He promises and delivers a "warts and all" picture of Ford's history. Brinkley is at his strongest discussing Ford's origins. But the book is also sprawling, diffuse and unfocused, with a somewhat confusing tendency to jump back and forth along the twentieth century timeline. It is more than a biography of Henry Ford, but less than a thorough history of the Ford Motor Company. The author nods in the direction of the technological, managerial and financial forces that have shaped Ford since the 1950s, though he presents Ford's (both man and company) earlier history in vivid detail. The impact of what Henry Ford did and how he did it still shapes industry in the United States. We recommend Brinkley's book for its revealing picture of one of the twentieth century's most influential industrialists.
 A Disappointment January 21, 2004
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
I found no mention of Harry Ferguson, the Ford-Ferguson tractor(perhaps the most significant agricultural tractor of the Twentieth Century), or subsequent tractor work by Ford. There was no mention of Dearborn Motors, nor its significance to the Company.
An Admirable Attempt at the History of an Enigma December 21, 2003
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Henry Ford was an enigma, and he remains one despite more than 850 pages of text in this fine history of the man and his company. Douglas Brinkley offers a court history of breadth and scope, relying on the rarely accessible Ford Motor Company archives to flesh out stories of the birth of the assembly line, the Model T, union busting in the 1930s, anti-Semitism, and successes with the Mustang, LTD, and Taurus.Throughout "Wheels for the World" Henry Ford is the force that creates and holds a corporate empire together. Brinkley devotes the first two-thirds of the book to him, exploring the paradoxes in his psyche: a self-taught engineer who created a corporate empire, a high minded entrepreneur in the mold of Robert Owen at one time and an anti-union zealot at another, and a man who used his wealth and power to spout ill-informed and sometimes demagogic ideas. Brinkley's final assessment is well-reasoned and enigmatic.
Get to know the true history of Ford November 16, 2003
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
It takes a true master author to write an 800-page biography of a well-documented and known history while keeping the reader fully engaged like a mystery novel.I was at first intimated by the size of the book but then pleasantly surprised at how well it was written. The author takes us through the journey of Henry Ford's life from birth to the creation of Ford Motor all the way to the arrival of the 3rd Ford family member to take over the company in 2002. What makes this book so good is the fact that the author strikes a perfect balance between giving the reader intimate details of the Henry Ford's day to day life as well as moving the story along. In the end I believe the author did a fantastic job of capturing the spirit of Ford Motor Company, its struggles, its success, its failures, and its challenges through the life of its leader. This book is highly recommended as the first car history book you give a young reader.
Mechanization of the world picture September 20, 2003
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
As the author notes the history of corporations is often neglected. This account of the primordial emergence of Ford and his 'jalopy', man and corporation, tells the history of an age, and is worth following in slow motion even if we know the gist already. Ford himself is a puzzle, and the contradictions seen in the later shadowy side visible in the cockeyed stupidity of his antisemitism leave a mystery figure for the record. The younger Ford with his audacious $5/day seems a man of uncommon sense and this belies the image of the cliched capitalist and it is sad to see how the System closes in on him in the end. A classic saga well told.
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