Paul Ingrassia, formerly the Detroit bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and later the president of Dow Jones Newswire, is the deputy editor-in-chief of Reuters. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 (with Joseph B. White) for reporting on management crises at General Motors, he is the author of Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry s Road from Glory to Disaster."
"A must for anyone with a passion for cars, history, or simply an
interest in America's story." --Bask Magazine
"Entertaining and instructive..."--George Will, The Washington
Post
"Highly entertaining... lucid... Engines of Change informed and
charmed me..."--Joseph Epstein, The Wall Street Journal
"In Engines of Change, Mr. Ingrassia arguably does for cars and
culture what David Halberstam did for a decade in The Fifties.
History well researched, made alive, relevant and eminently
readable."--John Lamm, The New York Times
"In this new book, Ingrassia traces the history of some iconic cars
and how those models reflected shifts in politics, culture, and
technology. He also takes readers inside the industry, skillfully
navigating among the soaring tail fins, egomaniacal visionaries,
and corporate intrigue that surrounded the creation of these
vehicles."--Boston Globe
"Ingrassia succeeds in fashioning well-researched, swift-paced
narratives around each of these 15 select automobiles. Using
colorful detail, he effectively recasts these significant driving
machines in their respective cultural contexts and brings to life
the eras they influenced."--Kirkus Reviews
"Ingrassia takes great pleasure in historical irony, and the
unpredictable conclusion of each car's story is so fascinating even
those who prefer their MetroCard to the BQE will appreciate the
inherent paradoxes of the vehicle's road to glory."--New York Daily
News
"Paul Ingrassia knows where the bodies are buried, or maybe where
the keys to the American car business got lost. With a swift, sure
scalpel honed by years as the industry reporter, he anatomizes
Detroit in all its glory and inglorious decline. A thoughtful,
propulsive assay of themachine that changed a nation, a
world."--Dan Neil, car critic, The Wall Street Journal
"Paul Ingrassia...is probably the best broadsheet reporter ever to
cover the car business...Picking 15 vehicles as tent poles for this
sprawling canvas was a good idea, and Ingrassia chose well...Any
book on a topic so overwhelming as the car in America has to be
more of a goad to, than a proof of, argument. And here Ingrassia
has succeeded."--Weekly Standard
"Paul Ingrassia's Engines of Change: A History of the American
Dream in Fifteen Cars ranges as widely and quirkily as the title
suggests among the people, passions and foibles of
the automotive industry. As a journalist for the Wall Street
Journal, Ingrassia shared a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for writing on
General Motors Co. In this book he lets out the journalistic stays,
enjoying the freedom to openly needle an industry and admire its
pioneers without any loss of the good reporter's delight in detail
and a fine tale."--Jeffrey Burke, Bloomberg BusinessWeek
"Sure, cars suck up gas, and they promote suburban sprawl, but they
also help drive the economy, and drive families from home to school
to soccer field. And, of course, cars fire our imaginations. Paul
Ingrassia, who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from Detroit for
The Wall Street Journal, has written a book about cars that may not
all be cherished classics or engineering marvels, but have earned a
place in America's scrapbook."--Scott Simon, National Public
Radio
"The prose is lapidary, the tone informed by humor.Paul Ingrassia
has written an automobile book that goes beyond the genre;it's for
anyone interested in modernity and what led us to where we
are."--Miles Collier, The Revs Institute for Automotive
Research
"The whole country in 15 cars--that's crowded! And Engines of
Change is indeed packed from rocker panels to sunroof with good
stories and salient facts about the automobiles that shaped
America, from the oddity of the Model T to the oddballs driving the
Prius."--P.J. O'Rourke
"Using his nimble narrative gifts, Mr. Ingrassia turns the creation
stories behind the Prius and other cars into gripping accounts of
how visionary design, corporate competition and inventive
engineering combined to produce automobiles that would come to
represent an era or a mind-set."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York
Times
"You will never look at a car the same way after reading Engines of
Change--as I strongly recommend to anyone who relishes great
storytelling that combines biography, social and political history,
science, and romance. Having driven and virtually lived in a 1953
Plymouth on a year's journey across Eisenhower's America, and
having followed that up many driving years later by writing on the
innovations of Henry Ford, I thought I knew something of the
history of cars. I was all the more surprised--and vastly
entertained--by the riches in Ingrassia's stories of fifteen
vehicles embodying the American dream from the Model T to the
Beetle, the Corvair, the Corvette, and the Mustang to the pickups
and the Prius (driven by the Pious). Even readers who cannot tell a
camshaft from a cami-knicker will find fascination in a gallery of
characters depicted by Ingrassia with vivacity and wit."--Sir
Harold Evans
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