Grounded: Frank Lorenzo and the Destruction of Eastern Airlines

In this tense, event-by-event account of the crash of Eastern Airlines in the late 1980s, as suspenseful as an air-disaster movie, Business Week reporter Bernstein presents Lorenzo as an obsessed anti-unionist. The Texas-based aviation empire he founded was crowned by the takeover of ailing Eastern Airlines, and his treatment of employees led to bitter, prolonged strikes and lawsuits that threatened to cripple national transportation. Union efforts on the employees' behalf to secure a purchaser for the near-bankrupt airline were thwarted by Lorenzo, who, in accordance with a 1990 court order, was removed from management in favor of a trustee, an order that the author considers a watershed in the labor policy of the Republican era. Author tour. (Aug.)