(FORTUNE Magazine) – When Carlos Ghosn moved to Japan in 1999 to rescue Nissan, a competitor said his mission would be the equivalent of putting $5 billion into a container ship and sinking it into the ocean. In his new book, Shift: Inside Nissan's Historic Revival, Ghosn deftly captures the way he felt joining a strange company in a strange land. "It's something of a shock to find yourself suddenly embedded in a fairly opaque Japanese organization, with all your reference points gone."

As all the world knows, Ghosn, who still runs the automaker, succeeded better than anybody (except himself?) might have imagined. Ghosn shows himself to be an astute judge of human nature with a surprisingly sharp tongue. He catches onetime Chrysler executive Bob Lutz whining about having to attend six retirement parties for his boss, Lee Iacocca. He describes GM's early 1990s purchasing whiz, José Ignacio López, as little more than a charlatan and a shakedown artist. And he characterizes seemingly humble Toyota as "imperious and sure of itself. On one side there was their system, and on the other side, the rest of the world."

When he's not skewering competitors, Ghosn goes into considerable detail about how he identified and analyzed Nissan's management paralysis, strategic fuzziness, and lack of coordination. Disappointingly, he says very little about how he actually fixed them, aside from communicating targets and then measuring progress. Our suspicion? The always cagey Ghosn wants his real turnaround tips to remain trade secrets. -- Alex Taylor III