Over a 15-year stretch, whenever a company got into trouble, Steve Miller seemed to be the guy to call. He was whisked from one corporate suite to the next, serving as C.E.O. or de facto boss at numerous companies, including ­Morrison Knudsen, Waste Management, Bethlehem Steel, and a half-dozen others. Along the way, he encountered every sort of corporate mishap you can think of: bad mergers, incompetent executives, bloated pensions, outright fraud. At Federal-Mogul, a distressed auto-parts company, he served three stints as C.E.O. When he was installed the second time and called to tell an executive assistant, she shot back, “Don’t worry; I know the drill.” Once, he was packing his bags and clearing out of New York after a short stretch with Reliance Insurance when he heard his telephone ring—for Miller, always an ominous sound. It was one of Aetna’s directors, William Donaldson, begging Miller to come to Hartford, Connecticut, and straighten out the health-insurance behemoth.

I got to know Miller when I was writing about his final, and perhaps defining, job: C.E.O. of Delphi, a General Motors spinoff that was hopelessly burdened by labor costs. He seemed then to be a disarmingly candid if not always humble executive, and this is the fellow we meet in The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America’s Most Troubled Companies.

It’s a riveting tale, stitched together by a central theme, which may be described as the nobility of old-fashioned labor. Miller is the kind of guy who likes machines—“sawmills, ships, earth­movers.” He grew up in Oregon, and though his father was a corporate lawyer, his grandfather, who ran a lumber mill, was for Miller the epitome of the rolled-up-sleeves ideal. “Every moment,” he writes of his summers at the mill, “I was absorbing lessons about the vital dignity of work.” And it’s a tale with irony too, because as Miller comes of age, the brick-and-mortar industries he loves are well into their decline. He is practically their undertaker; he vows to reinvent industrial America as a leaner, meaner, and more competitive place.

A graduate of Stanford Business School, Miller began his career at Ford Motor in 1968, when the executives, unaware of the turbulence ahead, seemed as secure in their jobs as tenured professors. But in 1979, Miller jumped to Chrysler, as an assistant controller, and plunged into the task of ­persuading the teetering auto­maker’s bankers to refinance its debt.

During the next couple of years, he made 116 trips around the country and, though still a junior executive himself, arm-wrestled bank presidents for loans. For Miller, it was a transforming experience. He saw the delicious upside of being in a crisis: “You get to make decisions without being hobbled by bureaucracy,” he writes. In his memoir, he also applauds the government for providing Chrysler a loan guarantee; it was a controversial step that was crucial to the company’s survival. Though his position is at odds with his self-description as a “doctrinaire, sink-or-swim capitalist,” the author is no ideologue. At heart, he’s a sentimentalist.

After the bailout, life at Chrysler settled down, and Miller, having been promoted to chief financial officer, discovered he was bored. But he waged a gutsy battle against chairman Lee Iacocca, who was famous for saving Chrysler and had acquired the trappings of royalty. Miller zings Iacocca for losing the common touch (and for believing his own press). Later, Miller is equally skillful at dressing down such boardroom egos as Carl Icahn and Al Dunlap, the Sunbeam C.E.O. known for ruthless cost-cutting. Having visited “Chainsaw Al,” Miller slyly reports that Chainsaw’s house was decorated like a shrine to himself. This is an apt sendup of the C.E.O. who was soon after exposed as a fraud.

At Chrysler, Miller’s criticism of Iacocca soured the chief on him, and in 1992 he went to work for the financier James Wolfensohn. Though Miller hardly expected it, his Chrysler experience had branded him a financial firefighter. His first client was the developer Paul Reichmann, and despite Miller’s best efforts, Reichmann had to file for bankruptcy. But one thing about being a rescue artist (and Miller doesn’t quite admit this): You really can’t lose. The trouble is the other guy’s fault; the success, yours.

Miller left Wolfensohn, but by then, he recounts, he “seemed to be on everyone’s short list for corporate crisis jobs.” One plus to his career, and to the book, is his steady accretion of expertise; crisis work turns out to be a discipline like any other. At Bethlehem, Miller enjoyed his greatest success, getting the union to agree to a sale and paving the way (post-bankruptcy) for a streamlined, more productive steelmaker. He tried to repeat the formula at Delphi, where he dreamed of liberating the auto industry from the choke hold of pension and health-care costs. Instead, he found himself a pariah, vilified by the United Auto Workers. Miller was right about the need for labor concessions, but it’s not too hard to figure out why he wasn’t loved.

Though a down-to-earth guy—one who never outgrew his lumberjack plaids—Miller cannot help sounding preachy when he talks about the great things he did for America by driving factory wages down near the level of those of Wal-Mart employees. When he confesses, “As strange as it may sound coming from someone with my range of experience, I was a little in awe of Wolfensohn,” you want to reply, “No, it doesn’t sound strange at all.” Wolfensohn was, after all, an international star who eventually became president of the World Bank. It’s strange only to Miller, whose view of himself is inflated. And when he advises executives, “Don’t worry about [taking] credit,” one wonders why his excellent ghostwriter, ­Michael D’Antonio, isn’t mentioned on the cover or the title page, only hidden in the acknowledgments. Still, this is a highly engrossing memoir, poignantly leavened by the story of the untimely death of Miller’s wife. No one executive can fix all of corporate America, but Miller came close.