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Grand Delusions - The Cosmic Career of John DeLorean

By Hillel Levin
ISBN: 0-670-26685-X

A good look at the life and times of John DeLorean.  Interesting stories about DeLorean's early years. His business enterprises started early (just ask the phone company). 

Book Cover

From a script
for a never-produced
promotional movie about
the DeLorean Car Company

We return now to John De Lorean in his office, standing in
front of a worldwide map or some other business graph.
He says something like this: "Our dream is coming true,
and justifying the calculated risks we took. Sure, I'm a risk
taker. And the people who drive our DeLorean car are
probably risk takers, too. People who dare to lead other
people....People who live life to its fullest potential....People
who enjoy the special exhilaration of making things happen.
...People who dream of a better world, and do whatever is
needed to transform that dream into reality."
John DeLorean is next shown sitting inside his car. He
 ends by saying, "As hard as I've struggled, I'm one man who
can say that my dream has come true.  Our difficult efforts
have succeeded, life is good, and I'm grateful!"
Then De Lorean closes the car and drives off onto a
handsome modern highway with elegant skyscrapers in
the background. Closing music and credits appear over this
final radiant scene.

 

Back Cover

From the Jacket Flaps:

When in October 1982 the Flamboyant auto executive John DeLorean was arrested for possession of over sixteen million dollars' worth of cocaine, the world was aghast and fascinated. Seldom does real life furnish so bold and precipitous a personal downfall. Until then, his career had been the stuff of legend. Until now, no one has entirely understood the man behind the legend.

Few stars have shone more brightly than his: he was an "A" student who didn't have to crack a book, a brilliant engineer who single-handedly saved Pontiac, a visionary entrepreneur who shot to the top of GM and then left it behind, a reputed Hollywood swinger, and a charismatic millionaire who seemed to care about the little people who worked for him. But there was a darker side to the DeLorean story, a side that more and more clouded his life, until he was forced into what most people believe was a last desperate attempt to save the two-year-old factory in Northern Ireland and its startling gull-winged products. Like everything he did, DeLorean's fall was larger than life - but the reasons for it were at work just as powerfully in his ambitious rise as in his dramatic downfall.

From the scattered fragments of DeLorean's acts and dreams, investigative journalist Hillel Levin - who began to look closely at the truth behind the image a year before anyone lese did - has pieced together a fascinating picture of the man behind his contemporary myth. From the  beginning, DeLorean's flight was fueled by a remarkable talent for financial legerdemain and corporate intrigue. Through meticulous research and interviews with the players in DeLorean's inner circle, Levin tracks the court cases and the lawsuits that accompanied his ascent, disentangles his convoluted and bizarre business schemes, explores the labyrinth of holding companies and paper corporations that channeled huge sums of other people's money into his personal control, and reconstructs the saga of the gull-winged car that, until the last, DeLorean believed would rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes.

Authoritatively researched from Detroit to Belfast, packed with new information, Grand Delusions is a riveting, uniquely American story, and a cautionary tale of genius misapplied in the service of a runaway ego.

This page last modified on Tuesday, April 08, 2008