In the Rings of Saturn

An entertaining account of the rise and fall of the Saturn plant, built by General Motors in Tennessee to produce an entirely new car that would reinvent the way American companies manufactured automobiles. 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. Telling the story through the standpoint of dozens of characters, from local farmers, to inspired assembly line workers, to `car smarts and gut feel' engineers, 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 that if the USA wants to produce high quality products that the world will want to buy, it must begin to adopt methods similar to those used in making the Saturn car.