Once upon a Car

Once upon a Car

Introduction

The book “Once upon a Car” is written by Bill Vlasic. The book was published in 2011 by HarperCollins. The book is the masterpiece of information about the cars. It elaborates in detail the designing, engineering, assembling, and selling of the best cars of the world. The book includes 379 pages that present the case of recent fall and resurrection of the Detroit car manufacturers. The topic that is studied in the book is followed by many other journalists in the past (Karesh, 2011). Alex Taylor III and Paul Ingrassia have already reviewed the similar topics. Other authors like Steve Rattner and Bob Lutz also have presented their work. But this book by Vlasic is still one of the recommended books. It also possesses few weaknesses. This paper aims to explore above discussed topics in detail.

Discussion

The topics covered by other authors like Taylor are the combination of the personal experiences of the author. They also include personal biases and personal relations in account to the subject in discussion. The work of Vlasic is unique because it combines the data and experiences collected from 100 different interviews. Some of these interviews were covered by the author as a reporter in the Business Week and New York Times. The experiences that are derived from other individuals are what make this book recommendable. The reader feels that he is personally talking to the interviewees when reading the book (Niedermeyer, 2011).

The length of book is 100 pages more than the book written by Ingrassia. When compared from Taylor'sbook, it has 140 more pages. Despite the length from other works in similar topics, the book is easy to read and interesting. This can be related to the ability of the author Vlasic to make a connection between the reader and the text. He knows how to make a story engaging which leads to undisturbed and continuous connection (Karesh, 2011).

The weakness of the book is that Vlasic has not critically reviewed the statements of any executive. He tried to maintain the positive image of all executive by presenting them in a flattering light. Vlasic should have sharply criticized the executive where ever needed. The author also allowed the extended interviews for the executive who had positive perception in the minds of the car users. The people that were well covered in the book are Bill Ford, Alan Mulally, Jum Farley and Marks Fields (Vlacis, 2011). ...