While the subtitle of Pendergrast's study suggests an ambush of Coca-Cola, the author obviously received at least semiofficial assistance in compiling his gossipy, essentially sympathetic history of a company that has attained cultural as well as commercial success. In a saga notable for vivid anecdotal detail, journalist Pendergrast toes the chronological line and appears more interested in telling lively tales than in providing a standard reference on the colossus of the soft-drink trade. The vastly entertaining, if episodic, narrative gets down to business with the story of Asa Candler, the Atlanta-based pharmacist who acquired rights to a patent medicine hawked as Pemberton's Tonic, renamed it Coca-Cola, and launched what became a multinational enterprise. The founding father's heirs sold out to Robert Woodruff in 1919; during his long tenure, the new patriarch single-mindedly focused on making the brand as familiar a symbol of America around the world as the stars and stripes. For over 90 of its 100-odd years, however, Coke has vied with upstart Pepsi for dominion in consumer outlets. Stung by the latter's steady inroads and cheeky ad campaigns, the young executives who took control of Coca-Cola during the 1980's ordered a change in the legendary formula. The public and press reacted furiously to any tampering with the flavor of the iconlike beverage, forcing the company to beat a hasty retreat. As Pendergrast makes clear, Coke has since recovered from this blunder and—despite ongoing problems with environmentalists, human-rights activists, and allied critics—has continued to expand its extraordinary franchise. A chatty, scrupulously documented account of a corporate phenomenon (and far more revealing than Elizabeth Candler Graham's The Real Ones, 1992) that's a bit like Coke itself: zesty and transiently refreshing. (Eight pages of photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: May 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-684-19347-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
An informative if overlong account of how American car makers regained much of the ground they had lost during the 1980s to foreign rivals in their own backyard and Europe. Drawing mainly on their own reportage as Detroit-based correspondents for The Wall Street Journal, Ingrassia and White offer a lively series of set pieces illustrating how Motown's Big Three (Chrysler, Ford, General Motors) managed to avert envelopment by their Japanese counterparts (Honda, Nissan, Toyota, et al.) and to launch an impressively effective counterattack. In large measure, the authors conclude, the improvement in the US industry's fortunes is attributable to its capacity to adopt and adapt the cost-control, employee-empowerment, productivity, and quality- assurance techniques pioneered by Japanese manufacturers. As Ingrassia and White make clear, however, the makeover was convulsive on the assembly line as well as in the executive suite. The authors do a fine job of reconstructing the boardroom coups that resulted in the ouster of such old-guard stalwarts as Chrysler's Lee Iacocca, Ford's Don Peterson, and GM's Bob Stempel (the unfortunate engineer who inherited the god-awful mess Roger Smith had made of the planet's largest commercial enterprise). Covered as well are the lesser lights who designed the passenger vehicles (Chrysler's Neon and Ford's born-again Mustang among others), plus the plant managers who reconciled the requirements of lean production with the aspirations of a unionized work force accustomed to adversarial labor relations. On the minus side of the ledger, Ingrassia and White have not resisted the temptation to include whatever they've learned in more than a decade on the automotive beat, and their narrative occasionally veers into trivial byways. Nonetheless, an engrossing and cautionary take on a consequential industry whose welfare is everybody's business. (16 pages of photos, not seen) (First serial to the Wall Street Journal; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79214-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
A wonderful pudding of a book that serves up large helpings of US socioeconomic history over the past 35 years or so. The title and subtitle notwithstanding, GQ columnist Nocera never makes clear precisely what he means by the middle class. Nor does he provide a systematic reckoning on the financial times since 1958 (when BankAmerica launched what became the Visa credit card). What he does offer, though, are thoroughly engrossing takes on the breakthrough innovations that democratized America's monetary life. There are tellingly detailed briefings on the largely unsung creators of money-market mutual funds (including the first to give investors check-writing privileges), NOW accounts, negotiable CDs, no-load mutual funds, and other financial services that an affluent society now takes for granted. The author also profiles the bankers, Wall Streeters, and others who played leading roles in a revolution that profoundly altered Main Street's attitudes toward credit, debt, investment, and savings. Cases in point range from Peter Lynch (Fidelity's star portfolio manager until his 1990 retirement) through Charles Schwab (of discount brokerage fame), Citicorp's Walter Wriston, and Marshall Loeb (former editor of Money, which continues to overstate the rewards while minimizing the risks of do-it-yourself capitalism). Assessed as well are the convulsive consequences of Paul Volcker's conquest of inflation, deregulation of depository institutions, the stock market's 1987 crash, and the low interest rates that channeled increasing amounts of money into equities during the early 1990s. Conspicuous by its absence, though, is any sustained coverage of the S&L scandals, insider trading, the takeover boom, junk bonds, the assets controlled by insurance companies, derivative securities products, exchange-listed options, futures contracts, and allied aspects of the domestic financial scene. Even so, Nocera delivers a savvy rundown on the landmark developments that in less than four decades have made consumer finance a multilateral bazaar in which beating the markets is a populist pastime.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-66756-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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