Book Alert / Bethlehem Steel

Bethlehem Steel -- Builder and Arsenal of America by Kenneth Warren, Pittsburgh UP '08, $45, 344 pages, ISBN #0822943239. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Remember when the word "crater" described the ditch dug by a falling asteriod? More frequently today, it denotes a failed corporate enterprise and is often used as a verb. It is the bad fortune of author Kenneth Warren, Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, to have written his knowledgeable saga of the rise and fall of Bethlehem Steel just before the bottom fell out of the financial services and auto industries. Another crater? Yawn. Wake me when it's over.

Warren describes how the Bessemer process of refining steel enabled Bethlehem to become a corporate behemoth while helping mightily to build the American infrastructure and support heavy armaments for waging war. Between the two world wars, Bethlehem ranked as the world's second largest steelmaker.

"But in the 1980s and 1990s," the author writes, "through widely fluctuating times, losses outweighed gains, and Bethlehem struggled to downsize and reinvest in newer technologies. By 2001, in financial collapse, it reluctantly filed for Chapter ll bankruptcy protection. Two years later, International Steel group acquired the company for $1.5 billion."