Reviews and Comments

Title: A complicated asshole. If only he’d stayed on the farm…
I started this book after reading about Ford’s anti-union enforcement in Loomis’ History of America in Ten Strikes. I learned a lot about pieces of Ford’s life outside of automobile production, like his hatred of banks, excess and waste. I also found out about the myriad people whose work Ford claimed credit for. It was completely unsurprising that he was a good friend of Edison, whose primary claim to fame is standing on the right people to loom large.
His primary focus throughout his life was reducing waste, and things he deemed wasteful. This led to him saying in his later years, “A great business is really too big to be human.” I think what he meant was “humane”, as his treatment of people on his assembly line looked very much like Amazon’s does now. Turning people into mere parts in an efficient machine. He marketed himself as a “man of the people”, and indeed, he did many things that helped his fellows… but usually in pursuit of greater power and control for himself. He severed any relationship that threatened that control, and brutalized many people’s lives along the way.

I went in with the hope that I would learn more of what drove Henry Ford to be a larger-than-life figure. People are multifaceted, and I mostly knew two things for which he was famous: he implemented the assembly line for construction of automobiles, and that he was a raging anti-Semite. Both of those are true, though the latter is more fully accurate than the former. Ford was a strong-willed, charismatic leader of people with visions of how things could be improved and innovated upon, and in the beginning, surrounded himself with like minds to create monumental strides forward in efficiency. Over time, as his megalomania was occasionally checked, he strove to emerge the “victor”, rather than learning from his mistakes. This consistently leads to paranoia and isolation, through history to many individuals. Ford was an extremely interesting person, and I feel that I understand his place in history, so I highly recommend this biography.

Quotes attributed (maybe falsely) to Henry Ford:
"Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again."
"Man has made many gods. How do I know I can find out which, if any, is the genuine one?"
"Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them and if he has any brains he will apply them."
"We must go ahead without the facts. We will learn as we go along."
“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.”

Words learned in the book: encomium, bruited, codicil

Highly recommended! Each chapter is a story, but the book jumps around in time. It's not a linear story because it reads like somebody telling their story; some chapters could have started with "That reminds me of the time...". While I'm non-trans myself, I remembered some similar situations in my life when I was told to shut down my authentic self so other people wouldn't be uncomfortable, so those moments in his life really connected with me.

Some of it was tough to read, and I had to take a few breaks after particularly emotionally charged chapters, but because I knew he finds himself in the end, I kept coming back. It definitely highlighted for me how fast the world is (and isn't) advancing toward inclusion and acceptance. It's emotional, and sometimes heartbreaking; but in the end, Pageboy is a triumphant story of a boy who slowly learned to love himself as a man.

The Tao of Pooh is one of the most interesting concepts for a book that I've ever read. The author writes in first person, but includes Winnie the Pooh as a character with whom he's having a conversation about what works and what doesn't.

Winnie the Pooh has always been a great collection of characters, with Tigger, Eeyore, Piglet, Rabbit, Owl and Pooh all having drastically different outlooks on life, and managing to maintain friendships all the same. I think what this book highlighted for me was how useful it is to be able to see multiple perspectives on life while acknowledging that they all have strengths and weaknesses. Pooh is, in this book, the one who has the "right" perspective, but it's clear that he can't figure out everything on his own. The familiar characters are a very useful tool for looking at life with a bit of detachment, while still acknowledging feelings (a difficult balancing act for me personally). An excellent book for looking at suffering, the cause of suffering, the path through suffering and the end of suffering. Highly recommended.