In this compelling, readable narrative, Joe Sherman explores virtually every aspect of the Saturn project, America's biggest and most publicized industrial success of the last decade. Here is the whole story--Saturn's mysterious beginnings inside General Motors in 1982; the site hunt that involved 38 states and ended in Spring Hill, Tennessee; the plant's construction and the transfer of 5,000 UAW members to a historic Southern backwater; and finally the small car's triumph in the marketplace (Consumer Reports and J.D. Powers both dubbed Saturn a made-in-America breakthrough)--all woven together into a candid, panoramic tapestry. In the Rings of Saturn has a striking immediacy: the reader sees almost first-hand GM's 1991 Annual Meeting at the Grand Ole Opry led by chairman Robert Stempel, as gadfly stockholders turn the event into a parody. We spend a week on the crankshaft machining line under the care of paternal, bearlike teamleader Bob Courtemanche, experiencing Saturn's revolutionary but troubled team structure. We even drive around with Spring Hill's flamboyant, tobacco-spitting mayor George Jones, who tells Sherman that the difference between a "Yankee" and a "damned Yankee" is "a Yankee comes here and goes home; a damned Yankee stays." Dozens of characters, from local farmers, to inspired assembly line workers, to "car smarts and gut feel" engineers, move across these pages. Through these flesh-and-blood portraits, Sherman brings to life a very American story of renewal and growth, of great hope and soured expectations, of greed and lost opportunities. And he reveals as well the downside of the project--that while the car itself is a triumph, the project has failed to provide either the learning laboratory General Motors needed or a model for positive redevelopment rural America yearns for. In the Rings of Saturn is both the anatomy of a corporate triumph and an incisive commentary on industrial renewal in the United States. And it exposes the high hopes and earthshattering disappointments that occur when big business appears in rural areas. It is a volume that will enlighten business readers, inform the automotive industry, and entertain Saturn car buyers, many of whom will think: "My little car means all this?"

In the Rings of Saturn

Business & Money

Sherman, Joe

Biography & History

Oxford University Press

Charging Ahead is a classic tale of perseverance against daunting odds in the pursuit of a personal dream--and an environmental revolution. You'd have to be a fool to market a consumer electric car, let alone challenge the big three auto makers with a little start up company. But MIT graduate James Worden, with his girlfriend and a handful of audacious engineers, did both and he's well on his way to success. In this marvelous narrative, business writer Joe Sherman vividly describes how Worden and his team built the world's most advanced EV (electric vehicle), the Sunrise. Combining insightful biography with the best of science and business writing, Sherman captures not only Worden's own gripping story, but also the technical challenge of designing an electric car in an age of anxiety over the environment. He depicts Worden's fascination with EVs from childhood (he built his award winning first electric car in high school), tracing it through his monomaniacal career at MIT, where he organized a student team that built EVs for races worldwide, to the founding of Solectria, a company committed to building a consumer electric car. Sherman shows how, despite all the obstacles, Solectria eventually lined up such strategic partners as the Pentagon on its way to producing the Sunrise a lightweight, all-composite, high tech commuter car. The Sunrise would triumph over rivals from the Big Three in the 7th American Tour de Sol, and later travel from Boston to New York on a single battery charge. Charging Ahead is an engaging story of James Worden's struggle to succeed with idealism, energy, and technological superiority against seemingly impossible odds.

Charging Ahead

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Mylar protected dustjacket is price clipped.

The House at Shelburne Farms: The story of one of America's great country estates

History

Americas

P.S. Eriksson

A stranger in a buckboard appeared at Edward Saxton's door in 1885 and offered to buy his farm overlooking Lake Champlain. The farmer gave him an option and later sold. One of the largest houses in Vermont soon squatted in Saxton's apple orchard, only to be displaced within a decade by the biggest house in the state, a Y-shaped mansion of one hundred rooms manned by thirty servants and overseeing a 4000-acre agricultural estate.

The House at Shelburne Farms: The Story of One of America's Great Countryside Estates

Paul S. Eriksson

The House at Shelburne Farms: The Story of One of America's Great Country Estates

This account of the house now adapted to an inn tells of a rare triple treat: architecture of the era of boundless dreams—the so-called Gilded Age; landscape from the visionary mind of America's father of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted; and a vicarious sense of lifestyle as manifested by a distinctive, wealthy American family, the W. Seward Webbs.

Fast Lane on a Dirt Road: Vermont Transformed, 1945-1990

Countryman Pr

Built at the turn of the century, Union Station in Nashville was both a symbol and a cornerstone of the city in the first decades of the 1900's. This is the story of the building's architecture, history, and folklore. More than one hundred photographs, seventeen in full color. Indexed.

A Thousand Voices: The Story of Nashville's Union Station

Rutledge Hill Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sherman, Joe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sherman, Joe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sherman, Joe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In the Rings of Saturn

Charging Ahead

In the Rings of Saturn

The House at Shelburne Farms: The story of one of America's great country estates

The House at Shelburne Farms: The Story of One of America's Great Countryside Estates

The House at Shelburne Farms: The Story of One of America's Great Country Estates

The House at Shelburne Farms: The Story of One of America's Great Country Estates

Fast Lane on a Dirt Road: Vermont Transformed, 1945-1990

A Thousand Voices: The Story of Nashville's Union Station

A Thousand Voices: The Story of Nashville's Union Station