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Title: An Admirable Attempt at the History of an Enigma
Review: Henry Ford was an enigma, and he remains one despite more than 850 pages of text in this fine history of the man and his company. Douglas Brinkley offers a court history of breadth and scope, relying on the rarely accessible Ford Motor Company archives to flesh out stories of the birth of the assembly line, the Model T, union busting in the 1930s, anti-Semitism, and successes with the Mustang, LTD, and Taurus.Throughout "Wheels for the World" Henry Ford is the force that creates and holds a corporate empire together. Brinkley devotes the first two-thirds of the book to him, exploring the paradoxes in his psyche: a self-taught engineer who created a corporate empire, a high minded entrepreneur in the mold of Robert Owen at one time and an anti-union zealot at another, and a man who used his wealth and power to spout ill-informed and sometimes demagogic ideas. Brinkley's final assessment is well-reasoned and enigmatic.
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