Biography

The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Russ Banham page on 27 June 2024, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Russ Banham (born September 20, 1954) is an American author and reporter formerly with The Journal of Commerce and later a freelance journalist writing for The Wall Street Journal, Inc., Forbes, The Economist, Euromoney, Financial Times, Chief Executive and several other business publications and trade magazines.

Banham is the author of 32 books, including The Ford Century, an acclaimed history of Ford Motor Company translated into 13 languages; Higher, the best-selling history of aerospace giant Boeing and the U.S. aviation industry; Problem Solving: HBS Alumni Making a Difference in the World, a co-authored history of Harvard Business School (HBS), written with HBS Professor emeritus Howard Stevenson, and the first (2009) and second (2020) editions of The Fight for Fairfax, a 150-year political and economic history of Northern Virginia and the Greater Washington Region.

Banham is also a former actor known for co-starring with Bill Murray in the 1979 film Meatballs, and as a playwright and theatre director.

In 2003, Banham was asked to write the official 100-year history of Ford Motor Company. He obtained vital access to Ford family artifacts and company archives, culminating in The Ford Century. The book received favorable reviews in The New York Times and other publications. "Not only the Ford fan but the most casual student of American industrial history can get caught up in the saga, from the highs of Henry's invention of the moving assembly line and the explosive effect of his Model T on the masses to his elevation to near-holy utopian prophet, to the lows -- 30 years later -- of a senile Henry adrift at the helm of a company that had become half loony bin and half rat's nest, run by thugs and about to go belly-up any minute until . . . well, savor the story yourself." The book was selected as one of the five best books ever written about Detroit. More than 750,000 copies of the book are in print around the world. January Magazine called The Ford Century "a masterpiece of automotive writing." Upon the book’s publication, The Today Show’s Matt Lauer interviewed Banham and Charlie Rose devoted an entire show to The Ford Century.

Bibliography