Detroit Free Press reporter Levin (Irreconcilable Differences: Ross Perot vs. General Motors, 1989) pursues Chrysler and its former boss, fearsome Lee Iacocca. Some of the story is familiar. Iacocca, fired by Henry Ford II in 1978 for unseemly presumption, took his combative attitude to Chrysler. When Americans bought Japanese cars simply because they were better, he complained bitterly about US trade policy and, in tones many found to smack of racism, castigated the Japanese. Meanwhile, we discover, Chrysler invested in Japan and sold engines and cars from Mitsubishi as its own. True, Iacocca had steered Chrysler from the brink of bankruptcy (though not without the aid of Uncle Sam). But honking his own klaxon, Iacocca's style at Chrysler was at least as autocratic, in a manner of speaking, as that of his old nemesis, Ford, and he almost drove Chrysler to the brink again. Live by the Ford way, die by the Ford way seemed to be the case at Chrysler until 1992, when the board forcibly retired the feisty old King Lear of Auto Land. (Still driven, Iacocca, as front man for Kirk Kerkorian, now challenges his old firm in an audacious, albeit apparently ill-fated, $20.5 billion bid to buy the business.) Levin provides solid background. His story encompasses the whole industry, from Motown to Nagoya, with emphasis on Chrysler and its pugnacious former CEO in particular. He expertly describes the businessmen and the sales guys, the bean counters and the car guys who run the quintessential American industry. And though he doesn't quite kayo the most famous car guy, he lays into Iacocca with a will. ``That was Lee,'' he concludes, ``self-centered, greedy, quick to blame others, and blind to his own faults. And when you crossed him, look out.'' A cogent exposition that provides an understanding of who and what propels the monster auto industry through its exhilarating booms and dolorous slumps.
Pub Date: July 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-111703-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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