"In just twenty-five years, we have gone from the American century to the American crisis," Felix Rohatyn, the financier and social critic, tells David Halberstam. "That is an astonishing turnaround -- perhaps the shortest parabola in history."

The remark sets the theme of this powerful work by David Halberstam, The Reckoning: the fateful challenge to American industrial supremacy. Five years in the making, the book reveals a society that got too rich for its own good, racing through its postwar prosperity, developing wasteful habits, until in the mid-seventies, it fell prey to the unlikeliest of rivals, Japan, a nation only recently scorned for the low quality of its goods.

The Reckoning portrays the conflict between the culture of affluence and the culture of adversity. It presents the plight of an America whose very greatness is on the line. Here, he chooses two companies, Ford and Nissan, each the embodiment of its society, and tells their stories side by side, from the founders and owners right down to the men on the assembly line.

Not only has he entered the Ford executive suits far more deeply than previous writers, he has penetrated the closed, hostile world of corporate Japan -- an impressive coup -- and exposed fierce confrontations. He has taken the normally anonymous Japanese and given them faces, emotions, egos and vanities. One of the most surprising narratives in the book is the colorful tale of Nissan's reluctant invasion of the United States.

David Halberstam's two previous dramatic studies of major American institutions were The Best and the Brightest, about government and the military in the Vietnam era, and The Powers That Be, about the rise of modern media. He has won every major journalistic prize, including the Pulitzer, and two of his books were nominated for the National Book Award.

Genre: Non-Fiction > Business and Economics
Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket, 754 pages
Condition: Very Good with slight separation of front flap (images are of actual book with dust jacket)
Published: William Morrow & Co., 1986, First Edition
ISBN: 0688048382

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