Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City - Softcover

Grandin, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848311540 ISBN 13: 9781848311541

Publisher: Icon Books, 2010

Synopsis

In 1927, Henry Ford, the founder of the famous motor company and the richest man in the world, bought a 5,000 square mile-tract of land in the Brazilian Amazon. There he was going to build a rubber plantation.
To the unkempt rainforest he would bring the principles of mass production - order, efficiency and productivity. He would harness the river itself in order to transplant capitalist civilisation to the dark heart of the jungle. But Ford wanted more than just rubber. Across the United States, small-town America was giving way to growing cities, consumerism and crass, brash new society. Ford wanted to create in the Amazon an America in his own image - Fordlandia, full of neat houses, straight roads and restrained Puritanism. By 1945 it was abandoned in ruins.
Fordlandia is the powerful, never-before-told fable of the pride and arrogance of the man who thought he alone could tame the Amazon. Filled with clash and contradiction, it is the battle between industrialised capitalism and the raw power of nature; it is the struggle too within Ford himself, the man who despised the new America that he himself had set in motion, who spent twenty years and several fortunes on his Amazonian dream, yet never set foot inside it. Superbly researched and grippingly told, Greg Grandin gives us a portrait of a man suffering under the grand delusion that the forces of capitalism, once released, might then be contained.

About this title

Review:

‘Well written account of a forgotten chapter of industrial history...Grandin effectively underscores how Fordlandia is also the story of Ford’s own contradictions – and by extension, those of the modern world...’ Author: Times Literary Supplement

Hugo Chavez on author's previous book: 'What is happening today in Latin America? To answer this question, read Empire's Workshop.'

''Fordlandia’ by Greg Grandin, is about Henry Ford's doomed attempt to build a rubber plantation in the Amazon. It's an incredible story, and one which has many lessons (still unlearnt) about how the northern hemisphere misunderstands South America.' Author: Alex Bellos

'The story of Ford’s not-so-excellent adventure in the jungle is a writer’s dream and Greg Grandin takes full advantage of its dramatic potential...Grandin’s assessment of Ford is by turns critical and sympathetic, but always subtle.’ Author: London Review of Books

'Henry Ford’s vast project of building a city in the Amazonian jungle to provide his car factories with a reliable supply of rubber was greeted as a heroic civilizing mission when it started, and damned as catastrophic Western hubris when it failed. The saga remains an irresistible parable, both tragic and comic. I cannot stop thinking of Ford’s homesick managers staring glumly at the vultures overhead and dreaming of the pigeons back in Detroit. Greg Grandin’s wonderful ‘Fordlandia’ (Icon) is alive to every nuance of the story but is sparing with the condescension of posterity, reminding us that Brazil’s own loggers and soy farmers are ploughing the same cruel furrows today.' Author: TLS

‘An absorbing account of the forgotten jungle venture ... Grandin tells the story of Ford’s hubris with great skill and panache. His book works both as a gripping narrative of extraordinary events and as a telling fable of a dream destroyed by harsh realities.’ Author: Nick Rennison, Waterstones Books Quarterly

'A case history combining some of the tragic elements of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ alongside the naïve innocence of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.... An extraordinary tale of pride and stubbornness, a struggle on behalf of capitalism by a man who was convinced that industrialisation had given him the strength and know-how to bring even a mighty river like the Amazon to heel.' Author: Daily Telegraph

‘Greg Grandin's compelling new book [is] both a merciless exposé of misplaced idealism and a detailed study of the economic forces behind it.’ Author: Guardian

‘Grandin’s generous, pin-sharp book ... is, above all, a tale of Ozymandian hubris.’ Author: Sunday Times

‘Grandin has a fine time excavating the collapsed ruins of a corrupted dream.’ Author: Times

From the Author:

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and a Guggenheim fellow. He served on the United Nation's Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New Statesman and the New York Times.

About this edition

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1848311540
• ISBN 13: 9781848311541
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432