"In just twenty-five years we have gone from the American century to the American crisis," Felix Rohatyn, the financier and social critic, tells David Halberstam. "That is an astonishing turnaround-perhaps the shortest parabola in history." The remark sets the theme of this powerful work: the fateful challenge to American industrial supremacy. Five years in the making, the book reveals a society that got too rich for its own good, racing through its postwar prosperity, developing wasteful habits, until in the mid-seventies it fell prey to the unlikeliest of rivals, Japan, a nation only recently scorned for the low quality of its goods. The Reckoning portrays the conflict between the culture of affluence and the culture of adversity. It presents the plight of an America whose very greatness is on the line. Halberstam's trademark is to take a transcending event such as this and, by dint of exhaustive research and illuminating mini-biographies, make it come to life. Here he chooses two com-panies, Ford and Nissan, each the embodiment of its society, and tells their stories side by side, from the founders and owners right down to the men on the assembly line. Not only has he entered the Ford executive suites far more deeply than previous writers; he has penetrated the closed, hostile world of corporate Japan— an impressive coup-and exposed fierce confronta-tions. He has taken the normally anonymous