Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003 - Douglas Brinkley

Summer tiiiiime, and the driving is eeeeeeasy. Unless your car's brake lights decided they never want to turn off and drain your battery twice before you figured out what the heck was going on. And at one end at the end of your newspaper interview of 21-year-old Army sergeant Rudy Palma who just came back from Iraq, you have to go back in and knock on his family's mobile home door and ask if they can give you a "jump."

Um, where was I?

Oh, Harley Davidson and Ford are both 100 year old companies this year. There's even a Harley edition Ford truck. I'm sure there's a Ford edition Harley - four wheels, but only two work. badum.

Seriously, there's all kinds of guilt out there about cars. Henry Ford is the personification of evil for some, dubbed the mass production king or bastard depending on who you're asking.

But cars can be appreciated. And this book in it's - gulp - 858 pages attempts to spread the love for the Mustang, the Thunderbird and any other great Ford car that I can't think of because I've never been a great cars person.

Publisher's Weekly - Henry Ford

Two other histories of Ford are slated for publication this year; four were published last year. Brinkley, a University of New Orleans history professor, distinguishes his as the only "single volume business and social history of Ford Motor from 1903 to 2003." In fact, it's something different: a book about the people of Ford, including the Ford family, executives, workers, union organizers and others. Extensive new documentary materials tell Ford's story in the words of its people. Brinkley's focus never strays far from Ford plants in Highland Park, River Rouge and Willow Run, Mich., yet he reflects events taking place in the outside world through the actions and feelings of people in nearby Dearborn, Mich.

Listent to author Douglas Brinkley talk aobu the book, via NPR

Henry Ford was shrewd enough to see women as "the great consumers of America," and he tailored the Model T toward them, Brinkley says. "If the man was going to be working these 40- or 50-hour workweeks, that gave the woman the time to do the shopping, to be the one who perhaps bought the Model T or the family car, and he won a lot of women over to his product by doing that."

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Article Author: Temple Stark

A graphic designing wordsmith, with a decade-plus career in community journalism behind me. Take a mean photo, have a new camera, and have been riding the wave of Twitter for more than a year.

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