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It takes a while to get used to Vincent Curcio's highly colored prose, but his old-fashioned narrative technique suits his subject, the Kansas railroad mechanic who rose to become head of America's most dynamic car company. Born in 1875, Walter P. Chrysler came late to the automobile business, joining Buick in 1912, when the early companies were firmly established. Chrysler made his mark by being a great leader who thoroughly understood engineering and production, and who valued the contributions of his employees and directed them to produce high-quality, popularly priced cars. He made it his business to ignore conventional wisdom: he headquartered his company in New York instead of Detroit, commissioned a fabulous art deco skyscraper to house it, and introduced the first mass-produced, streamlined, aerodynamic car in 1934. The Airflow was a financial disaster but hugely influential on future design, and the well-managed Chrysler Corporation made money even during the Great Depression. Chrysler himself became enormously wealthy and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle during the decade before his death in 1940. Curcio's detailed, wide-ranging text offers an instructive history of the automobile industry as well as a full-bodied portrait of a classic American individual, praised by his peers as "one of the world's greatest manufacturers and one of the world's best men." --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
From humble beginnings as a Kansas railroad-shop apprentice wiping down locomotives for 5U cents an hour, Walter Chrysler (1875-1940) rose to become a railroad master mechanic and foreman, then a leading auto manufacturer and industrial mogul. Brashly confident, convinced of America's limitless potential for economic growth, Chrysler, "the quintessence of American business in the 1920s," built Manhattan's Chrysler BuildingAart deco emblem of modernism and progressAwhose spire went up just one month before the 1929 stock market crash. This dynamic biography brings a surprisingly neglected giant out of the shadows. Chrysler, self-educated, self-made son of a German immigrant, is not nearly as well known as Henry Ford, even though he expanded Detroit's Big Two (GM and Ford) into the Big Three, when Chrysler Corporation bought out Dodge in 1928. (His legacy lives on in Daimler-Chrysler, formed in 1998.) Two contrasting personalities emerge: one is the far-sighted, risk-taking industrialist, perhaps the last great individualist of automaking, a man who seemed genuinely concerned about his employees, a caring father of four with a rare gift for managing men, plants and machinery. The other is the hard-drinking, big-eating, tuba-playing bon vivant, "probably... a functioning alcoholic," who embarrassed his family and nearly wrecked his marriage thanks to his affair with showgirl Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Curcio never fully reconciles these two sides of his elusive subject, but his robust, engaging portrait is chock-full of lore from the classic automobile era, as it sets the Chrysler saga against the backdrop of the Roaring 20s, the Depression and the labor unrest of the 1930s. 50 photos. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
