Detroit on life support: will the big three become the small two?

• Author: Drum, Kevin
• Position: Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster - Book review

Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster

by Paul Ingrassia

Random House, 320 pp.

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Back in 1994, Paul Ingrassia wrote a book, with coauthor Joseph B. White, about the American auto industry. Its title, Comeback, pretty much says it all. Comeback was a gossipy, insidery account of Detroit's boardroom wars of the late 1980s and early '90s, which ended with the bad guys kicked out, a new breed of CEO taking charge, and the Big Three once again on top of the world.

What, I wondered, did the Washington Monthly think of all this back in the day? So I dug into the archives and took a look. James Bennet, who is now editor of the Atlantic but started his career at the Monthly, reviewed Comeback in 1994, and it turns out he was properly skeptical. "It is too much of a leap," Bennet wrote, "to conclude that Detroit has regained the lead, as the packaging of this book suggests, perhaps in hopes of drawing a wider readership." After all, the auto industry had looked publicly robust before, even as it was getting sicker on the inside. Was it possible that a strong yen was just hiding all the usual Detroit pathologies once again?

We all know the answer to that question now, so kudos to Bennet for getting it right fifteen years ago. But how about Ingrassia? His latest chronicle of the industry is called Crash Course, and once again the title says it all. So does Ingrassia get it right this time?

I won't make you wait for the answer: it's impossible to say. This time around Ingrassia takes a studiously descriptive approach to his subject, willing to forecast neither doom nor gloom nor anything in between. "Predictions are perilous," he admits at the end, and that's about all the fortune-telling we get from him.

The financial crash of 2008 will likely be remembered as the crisis that launched a thousand books. Crash Course is one of them, and it bears both the strengths and weaknesses of the quick-turnaround genre. Its biggest weakness is pretty much what you'd expect: it's brief, it covers a lot of ground with tick-tock prose, and it never takes us very far below the surface.

But that weakness is also its strength. Ingrassia never lets the plot slow down, and his just-the-facts-ma'am style makes this a terrific primer if you want to bone up on Detroit's first hundred years--as well as its final six months--but don't want to spend all day doing it. Crash Course, to use a metaphor that Ingrassia might...