Book of the week: Overhaul by Steven Rattner

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27)

Steven Rattner’s brisk new book provides “lots of insider details” about his brief but effective stint as President Obama’s car czar, said Steve Fishman in New York. In late 2008, the newspaper reporter turned private-equity investor was handed the important role of leading the Treasury Department teams that oversaw “one of the trickiest (and riskiest) corporate restructurings in recent history.”

Most of the book is focused on the “nuts and bolts” of the restructurings that “whisked” General Motors and Chrysler in and out of bankruptcy in a matter of weeks, said Micheline Maynard in The New York Times. Rattner, “clearly irritated by the intransigence of some of the players,” occasionally uses his book as an opportunity to name names and “settle scores.” Overhaul doesn’t have the same verve as, say, Lee Iacocca’s self-titled auto-industry classic. But this “exhaustive, detail-filled account” will surely be studied by lawyers and bankruptcy specialists for years to come.

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