The author's original subtitle was "God, Ford and the Kentucky School Bus Crash" but the publisher was afraid Ford Motor Company would sue. Ford built a bus with an exposed fuel tank; 24 children and three adults burned to death. This is the story of a mother and father who wouldn't rest until justice was done.
"Beautifully observed, a chilling accomplishment."
– The New York Times
Excerpts from the book
"Janey Fair kept going to the front door to look for the headlights that would signal Shannon's return. . . . The headlights would poke a white tunnel through the darkness, and then there'd be the warm, familiar sound of the motor, the clunk of the car door, a faint ' 'Night, thanks,' and the aluminum storm door would rattle open and Shannon would sweep in and tell her all about the day.
Silence." (p. 44) more
" 'The shoulder harnesses, the headrests are complete wastes of money,' Ford President Lee Iacocca told President Nixon. 'Every hundred dollars is a billion dollars a year to get to the safety problem. And you can see that safety has really killed all of our business.' "
(p. 152)
"A piano and flute duet played 'Amazing Grace' as the hearses took the three girls to North Hardin Memorial Gardens, close by North Hardin High School's football field, where the three would have marched in the band that fall. After spring ended and summer came and went, on a bright, crisp autumn Saturday, standing by their graves, you could hear the cheers, the trumpet charges, the cow bells and snare drums wafting softly on the breeze like intimations of another world, delicate, gentle, and terribly, terribly beautiful." (p. 88)less
Other Books by James S. Kunen
Praise for Diary of a Company Man
". . . James Kunen has done it again, with his acute, observant, funny and moving story of what's truly important in life."
– Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One
About James S. Kunen, author of Diary of a Company Man
© Peter Serling, 2011
James S. Kunen is the author of popular and critically praised books that grapple with legal and political issues in a personal way. A prize-winning journalist, he is best known for his 1968 memoir, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary—his account of the antiwar student strike at Columbia. He describes the journey from corporate PR man to teacher of immigrants in his new memoir, Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life.