B V. A

Boeing Versus Airbus messed with my head for maybe the first fifty or sixty pages. Maybe even the first hundred, if I really get into it. It came out in hardcover last year, and so there were these great blurbs from earlier reviews on the paperback copy from Vintage: “One of the great business stories of our times.” claimed the Chicago Tribune, while the Economist rhapsodized “An epic narrative…there is nothing quite like it… [and there’s] no better commentator on this sporting struggle than John Newhouse.”

I don’t know how other people do things, but I smoke cigarettes, and so there’s always a stack of books by the door, and if I’m not involved in some book, I’ll take one from the stack with me each of the way-too-many times I head out each day to smoke. I took Boeing Versus Airbus for like four days straight, reading a few pages at a time, and after two or three days I realized I was reading as much to find out if the book would continue in a way that felt wildly uneven as I was reading simply because I enjoyed the story itself.

The unevenness, or what I took for unevenness, is actually not as troublesome as I first felt, but be warned that this book doesn’t function as you may anticipate. The casual, nonfiction book about the history of something interesting (say: beer, or the toothpick, or whatever) that’s given to you chronologically, as a story? Yeah: that’s not this book.

Which was a huge frustration at the start. Reading the book was very much similar, I think, to listening to someone really smart jump from somewhat related subject to subject, expecting her or his listener to keep everything straight—or, at least, to trust that everything would be made clear eventually by the speaker.

I’m very happy to report that, in fact, John Newhouse sets everything right in Boeing Versus Airbus, and that all worries regarding the seeming unevenness at the start of the book are unfounded. I’m happy to report, basically, that it’s worth your time to trust him as an author and listen to the story because it ends up being, in real fascinating ways, a riveting story.

You know Boeing, right? The airliner’s based in Seattle and has employed tens of thousands of people for years and years and also has, very much, been a military contractor but also a company that’s designed hundreds of planes—and even if you hate flying, and hate the hassle of the airport and how the TSA people are real grabby and unfriendly, you have to admit that Boeing’s done a good job of making planes that don’t often crash (which seems like a dumb and obvious point, but it was worth recalling, over and over as I read—no matter what, these people were making gigantic tonnage take flight and all I do is read and write stuff down, so they’re pretty seriously in the lead). Newhouse hammers the point home over and over, but it’s worth remembering too: airplane manufacturing is a pretty phenomenal industry, GDP-wise, and so Boeing’s got an interesting position both in terms of US politics and finance.

And Airbus? A company made of a conglomeration of European nations, each of whom have stakes in the company—which company, as Newhouse does a good job of reminding the reader, gets way more than a few subsidies from said European nations, which subsidies protect their R+D department in monumental ways (best line in the book—a quote by Business Week’s Stanley Holmes: “If sales of Boeing’s 787’s flop, Boeing loses billions and faces the risk of going out of business. If A380 sales falter, Airbus doesn’t have to repay the $3 billion in loans.”)

It’s unfair (to both reader and book author: there are way too many details to do justice to, and many of them are eye-poppingly interesting and worth reading in Newhouse’s context) to get too much into the nitty gritty of how all this stuff plays out, but rest assured: no matter what level of interest you have in the development of Airbus’s A380, or any of the other planes they’ve designed and built; no matter what level of interest you have in the development of Boeing’s 7E7 (later renamed: 787); no matter how much you think you care about any of that stuff, I’m willing to bet that John Newhouse could actually get you much more interested—borderline riveted, actually—than you believe is possible. Prove me wrong. Buy the book and get into it and don’t get discouraged by the first fifty pages: it’s worth it.