Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit
Written by William Knoedelseder
Narrated by Peter Berkrot
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
The New York Times bestselling author of Bitter Brew chronicles the birth and rise to greatness of the American auto industry through the remarkable life of Harley Earl, an eccentric six-foot-five, stuttering visionary who dropped out of college and went on to invent the profession of automobile styling, thereby revolutionized the way cars were made, marketed, and even imagined.
Harleys Earl’s story qualifies as a bona fide American family saga. It began in the Michigan pine forest in the years after the Civil War, traveled across the Great Plains on the wooden wheels of a covered wagon, and eventually settled in a dirt road village named Hollywood, California, where young Harley took the skills he learned working in his father’s carriage shop and applied them to designing sleek, racy-looking automobile bodies for the fast crowd in the burgeoning silent movie business.
As the 1920s roared with the sound of mass manufacturing, Harley returned to Michigan, where, at GM’s invitation, he introduced art into the rigid mechanics of auto-making. Over the next thirty years, he functioned as a kind of combination Steve Jobs and Tom Ford of his time, redefining the form and function of the country’s premier product. His impact was profound. When he retired as GM’s VP of Styling in 1958, Detroit reigned as the manufacturing capitol of the world and General Motors ranked as the most successful company in the history of business.
Knoedelseder tells the story in ways both large and small, weaving the history of the company with the history of Detroit and the Earl family as Fins examines the effect of the automobile on America’s economy, culture, and national psyche.
William Knoedelseder
William Knoedelseder is the New York Times bestselling author of Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America’s Kings of Beer, as well as the critically acclaimed Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia. His book I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy’s Golden Era is the basis for the Showtime series of the same name. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
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Reviews for Fins
23 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Interesting automotive history told from a Harley Earl as a protagonist point of view. A good read for any automobile fan.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Although I was afraid this would be something of a throwaway puff piece, Knoedelseder gives one an effective life and times of Harley Earl, the man who, for better or worse, made styling as important as engineering to mass-market American automobiles. As for the subtitles, for there to be a rise of General Motors, there had to be a fall of the Ford Motor Company, and business strategy is a strong secondary element of the story being told. As for the glory of Detroit, that barely lasted a generation, and justifies some of the sociological angles that the author explores in this book. If nothing else, I find a lot of car books undercut by their authors' uncritical enthusiasm for their subject, whereas Knoedelseder comes both to praise and critique in equal measure, as required. I really have no salient complaints about this work. For those who want more nuts and bolts, well, other books exist for that.