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The Fords: An American Epic
Peter Collier
- List Price: $16.95
- Our Price: $12.71
- You save: $4.24 (25 %)
- Used Price: $5.70
- Publisher: Encounter Books
- Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
- Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 Stars
Product Details
Product Description: The Fords: An American Epic is the dramatic story of three generations of Fords and of the dramatic conflict between fathers and sons played out against the backdrop of America's greatest industrial empire.
- Paperback: 300 pages
- Publisher: Encounter Books
- ISBN: 1893554325
- Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.1 inches
- Weight: 1.2 pounds
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Customer Reviews
- The Fords: A personal look
- Avg. Customer Rating: 5 Stars
- The uniqueness of this book is that it focuses on the personalities of Henry Ford, his son Edsel and his granson, Henry II. The history of Ford Motor Company is presented as an outgrowth of these porsonalities. As a career Ford employee, it is my opinion that Ford Motor Co. has always reflected the personalities of those in charge to a somewhat greater extent than other large corporations. So the author's approach is particularly appropriate. And it works well. This is an absorbing book for anyone with an interest in the Ford family in relation to the growth and decline of Ford Motor Company and, motre widely, the business in the twentieth century.
- An interesting telling of the first three generations that built and ran the Ford Motor Company
- Avg. Customer Rating: 4 Stars
- This book recounts the origins and life of the Ford family from the rise of Henry Ford, the founding the great automotive company, its ebbs and flows, through the reign of Henry Ford II. It reads very well and has a great deal of interesting information.
One of the difficulties in writing a book like this is how to balance the personal details with the epic story of the global corporation. I believe Collier and Horowitz pull off the balance quite well. However, when this book came out there was a great deal of discussion about the womanizing that the family worked hard to keep out of the public eye. Some condemned this book because of these intimate details. Some claimed they were fabricated. Nowadays, given what we know about public versus private lives, it probably would not raise many eyebrows.
The life of Henry the Great is fascinating because of his genius and his limitations. His son Edsel has a story that is as tragic as any you might read in fiction. Henry II was given the task of saving the family company and with the team he built around himself he did an admirable job. The battles with Lee Iacocca may be slipping into ancient history, but it is still a very interesting story in the history of corporate governance. The recounting of Henry II's divorces and such may be fairly petty and is certainly not as important as his missing the real threat of the Japanese car companies.
The book is now almost twenty years old, but it still has its merits.
