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.