The Triumph of an Idea

The Story of Henry Ford

By: Ralph H. Graves

Narrated by: David Mitchell

Here is the story of a mechanically inclined farm boy who turned the automobile from a toy for the wealthy, into a necessity for modern life.

This biography approaches the story of Henry Ford in the context of his world. For example, roads were as much a factor for cars, as the car was for roads. The farmer would not risk his livelihood on a Ford internal combustion tractor until the engine proved itself in his Sunday car. And the public was suspicious of mass production until Ford showed it could provide value, quality, and good wages.

©2009 CoolBeat Audiobooks (P)2009 CoolBeat Audiobooks

Just Terrible; People Magazine in History

- Very awkward narrator (may be due to the old age of the recording).
- Very unusual in sentence and paragraph structure.
- Runs at about 50:50 random world history at the time to actual information about Ford
- Information about Ford is not well organized, very loose and starts late in his life
- It skips around in years

This is the first time I have wanted to return an audible book. Please, please avoid this title.

Shallow book badly read - waste of money and time

What would have made The Triumph of an Idea better?

More insight into Ford's organisation and people management. Coverage of Ford's problematic attitudes like antisemitism and support of nazis and Hitler.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of David Mitchell?

Anybody or nobody. Narration is very amateurish, but even the best performer would not save lack of content.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Triumph of an Idea?

Most of it. Long lists of contextual historical events and exhibition descriptions are almost unrelevant.

Very Poorly Written - Misleading Title

I bought this book expecting to listen to the story of Henry Ford and how an idea and vision had triumphed, instead I ended up listening to what I could easily find from Wikipedia about Henry Ford.

The author had shamelessly used the name of Henry Ford and written about a subject he clearly had no clue about. In every chapter he gives us a line or two about Mr Ford and then the storyline wonders to paragraphs of meaningless rambling about historical events that occurred during the time of the event author started to talk about.
If those historical occurrences were at least distantly related to Henry Ford or his triumphant vision we could have tolerated the book, but unfortunately about seventy five percent of the book has absolutely nothing to do with Henry Ford.

For example; he starts to tell us about what happend during a certain time of Mr Ford's life and then starts to tell us about who ruled France at the time, what happened in England politically and how a something else was occurring in India during the same time.

An absolute waste of time.