The Reckoning

The other day I was speaking to a local politician near Los Angeles who said that he once went to Detroit to meet with the then-president of GM, Roger Smith. He and another councilman were trying to get Smith to sell/exchange land that GM owned in their town and where the company had a factory it ha......more

In the 1980s, my father, like many working people around the country, underwent a painful divorce...from the US car industry. As a Uniroyal employee, he would fly to Detroit every 8 to 10 years and drive home with an almost-new American car bought at supplier rates. In the early 1970s, the Ford Falc......more

The Reckoning may be my favorite of David Halberstam's books. In my opinion, it and The Coldest Winter are more engaging and entertaining than The Best and the Brightest and The Powers That Be, which are the two books he's best known for. The Reckoning is Halberstam's exhaustingly researched tome (w......more

In the author's note, David Halberstam recalls that he thought the book would take five years to write. Reading it, I wasn't surprised. There's lots of detail as he spins the tales of internecine struggles at Ford and Nissan. The origin stories of both companies are fascinating: Ford, the creation o......more

What can I say — David Halberstam should PROBABLY have made this 500 pages instead of 750, but I still lapped it all up voraciously. His books are an art form: examination of an era via mini-biographies of 50+ people who were key decision-makers in that era. A worthy criticism of his books is that t......more