Customer Reviews

The Fords: An American Epic

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book recounts the origins and life of the Ford family from the rise of Henry Ford, the founding the great automotive company, its ebbs and flows, through the reign of Henry Ford II. It reads very well and has a great deal of interesting information.

One of the difficulties in writing a book like this is how to balance the personal details with the epic story of the global corporation. I believe Collier and Horowitz pull off the balance quite well. However, when this book came out there was a great deal of discussion about the womanizing that the family worked hard to keep out of the public eye. Some condemned this book because of these intimate details. Some claimed they were fabricated. Nowadays, given what we know about public versus private lives, it probably would not raise many eyebrows.

The life of Henry the Great is fascinating because of his genius and his limitations. His son Edsel has a story that is as tragic as any you might read in fiction. Henry II was given the task of saving the family company and with the team he built around himself he did an admirable job. The battles with Lee Iacocca may be slipping into ancient history, but it is still a very interesting story in the history of corporate governance. The recounting of Henry II's divorces and such may be fairly petty and is certainly not as important as his missing the real threat of the Japanese car companies.

The book is now almost twenty years old, but it still has its merits.

The uniqueness of this book is that it focuses on the personalities of Henry Ford, his son Edsel and his granson, Henry II. The history of Ford Motor Company is presented as an outgrowth of these porsonalities. As a career Ford employee, it is my opinion that Ford Motor Co. has always reflected the personalities of those in charge to a somewhat greater extent than other large corporations. So the author's approach is particularly appropriate. And it works well. This is an absorbing book for anyone with an interest in the Ford family in relation to the growth and decline of Ford Motor Company and, motre widely, the business in the twentieth century.

'The Fords: An American Epic' by David Horowitz & Peter Collier

Horowitz & Collier deliver yet another superb narrative of one of America's historic, controversial and complex families. They have this genre down to a science.

This is, without doubt, the best book on the Ford family I have read, and I've read a few. For an unbiased look at Henry's early tinkering in the garage to the perfection of the production line to his controversial stances on important world events, this book has no comparison. The strange inter-family relationships are broken down in detail and explained with clarity. The book focuses on family & business, which was no easy feat: Henry & Edsel's relationship; Lee Iacocca's influence on the Ford Motors; the return of "Hank the Deuce"; to Bill Ford's generation and more recent family activity.

A wonderfully enjoyable read that is as detail laden as it is fast paced. An easy call for 5 stars!

- JC

My Grandfather, who sold Ford-Lincoln-Mercury for 30 years and owned his own dealership, found everything he wanted and more in this book. Not an avid reader, he told me that he couldn't put it down, once he started. He read the entire thing in a week; which is saying something for him. If you are an American Automobile Industry follower, this is a must buy.

This book about the auto industry was written by two people who understand very little about business and less about automobiles. More importantly in terms of character assessment and description, they focus entirely on the wrong person.

Henry Ford
-managed to create a company from scratch with no resources
-designed and built a hugely successful automobile, the Model T
-conceived the first assembly line
-increased his workers salary by a factor of two to $5 per day
-and became extremely rich

Edsel Ford, his only son
-could not finish college
-was a dilettante
-had no apparent skills, other than a soft manner
-but was made President of Ford Motors by his father
-and proceeded to turn the company into a disorganized loss

Nevertheless, "The Fords" authors sympathies are entirely on the side of Edsel, so the first half of the book is mostly about poor (although extremely rich) Edsel

Fortunately, the second half focuses on Edsel's son Henry II, who was also made President at a young age but had the sense to bring in strong and experienced men to actually turnaround the company.