Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
 Entertaining and Enlightening, July 17, 2010
Honghao Tan (MI, USA)
Crash Course is a long scene drive trip along the auto industry development. It started with the creation of Big Three and emergence of UAW. Portray the main plot of this story: how a corporate model and UAW relationship intriguer the success of auto industry and middle class. How it evolve into a dysfunction dynasaur: management give in its responsibility to customers, shareholders to obtain less resistant cooperation of UAW. UAW transform from protecting workers right to soliciting resource they don't deserve. This model leads to 20 years decline of the industry. Yet Big Three doesn't muster courage to take a painful choice: reform and redemption until the bankruptcy.
As a result, the cost is shared by current management, current UAW members and tax payers. It is a shame. It is ugly. It is realistic.
However, the store inside the book is entertaining and intense. I kept the book on hands for whole days and find every chance to read it, even though English is not my mother language.
At the end of the book, Paul doesn't clarify the future path. He said "the predication is perilous'. The task ahead is clear. Culture revolution in company and in UAW. But it is hard to say which path it should take. I think his judgement make sense.
This is a good history book; it engage the readers by exposing readers to the environment of auto industry. Not only describing the fact, but also reproduce problems auto industry confront in different time so as to give readers a space of imagination.
Nevertheless, I think the book can do better in the roles of customers. The book neglect the role of customers from 1970s' to 1990 when domestic industry was sliding. It doesn't present comprehensively the conflict between the deteriorating perception of the Big Three and the impulse to buy 'Made in USA'.
Generally speaking, if you are not familiar with the auto history and want to imagine the future of it, this is a good reference.
 Fascinating account of what happens to an industry plagued by unions. July 15, 2010
P. Hartley (Nevada)
The UAW can be summed up as a contagious form of cancer. Worse than just cancer or a single parasite. A contagious, ever-growing, brainless, unconscionable and deadly cancer.
And equally unconscionable is that this filthy disease is STILL allowed to plague the very same companies they nearly killed, when it would have been perfectly logical and possible to wipe this dreaded tumor in 2009.
Now, it's free to begin growing and killing again. Ford got lucky they didn't also go bankrupt. But they've got the same cancer, just a better immune system for now and their luck will run out eventually.
 Read it on the plane. Liked it July 7, 2010
Datapoint3000 (Seattle, WA)
This is a solid overview of US car industry history that tells a good story and may inspire you to think about business strategy and corporate-union relations. The US auto industry has a colorful history, so the narrative of the book is entertaining. I went right through it on the first half of a flight to Tokyo. So that's the strength of the book.
On the downside, I was disappointed that a journalist of such longstanding experience did not appear to have done many interviews or to have gained much unique access specifically for this book. The whole story was related at a somewhat high level as if Ingrassia just went on vacation with his extensive memories of the car business and sort of put it all together. You rarely get the "you are there" details of a book like Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco or the very interesting car marketing book Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign. You don't get interviews with the major players where they look back on events from the 70s and reflect in retrospect whether they did the right thing. The book lacks, in sum, the kind of unique revelations that you might hope to find in a book rather than a long article.
Ingrassia is fairly reserved with editorializing. It's hard to avoid the conclusion, though, that the UAW put a bullet in the industry's head. However, it should be noted that management was timid. Management was timid in the face of the UAW's unrealistic demands and the union didn't have the self-restraint not to devour the company in a sick orgy of indulgence and exploitation of investors and the public. The reason management became timid, apparently, was that management was busy stealing (in a sense) from stockholders too, granting themselves compensation and benefits out of proportion to their true value as executives on the open market. So it's a sad story of conspiracy against consumers and investors. The ultimate consequence today is that our auto industry is weak and no one wants to start a new factory in the United States for fear of another UAW. Too bad.
2 books, 1 great, the other so-so July 4, 2010
C. P. Anderson (Charlotte, NC)
I didn't come to this book with any particular agenda, nor did I know tons and tons about the subject matter beforehand.
Given that, I felt the book was quite good at giving me a good, short history of the US car industry. From Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan, through the years of Harley Ear's tailfins, Lee Iacocca's Mustang, and John DeLorean's GTO, all the way up to the beginning of the end with foreign cars, high gas prices, poor management, and greedy unions, it's all there. I learned quite a bit. Ingrassia also has a wonderful style, and the book was a real page-turner. He was also pretty fair to the unions (especially for a WSJ writer).
The one thing I didn't like about the book was the coverage of the last few years, from about Chapter 10 on. This part of the book is very reportorial. It's basically just rather breathless coverage of one deal after another. Lots of execs jetting about, holding secret meetings, engaging in corporate infighting and politics. If that's your cup of tea, it's actually quite well done, and I'm sure represents a lot of sleuthing on the author's part. For me, though, it was just an overly long investigative news story, with way too many details and names to really follow closely. Personally, I would have appreciated a lot more analysis. Ah well, maybe we're just still close to all this to really get beyond the "first rough draft of history."
 Horrid, unlistenable audio interpretation of the book June 30, 2010
E. Lambeth
**THIS IS A REVIEW OF THE AUDIO INTERPRETATION OF THE BOOK, NOT A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ITSELF**
This audiobook is almost unlistenable. The narrator reads the source material as one long, grating, condescending sneer. He intones mightily - in the voice of that irritating know-it-all kid that you knew in second grads - against the auto industry, the unions, the state of Michigan, and most of the rest of America itself. He overlooks no opportunity to take the author's original words and work them up into a haughty implication of everyone else's inferiority.
After an hour of listening to this book, I wanted to punch the narrator in his arrogant face. I kept listening all the way through to the end because I was deeply interested in the source material, but it was misery putting up with his nasally derision. Run away, listener, run away!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
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