Americas : Fordlandia The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
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Manufacturer: Metropolitan Books
Release Date: 2009-06-09
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List Price: $27.50
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- ISBN13: 9780805082364
- Condition: New
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 Fascinating story about a little known era in the American century
In typical American histories, we hear precious little about American involvement overseas unless it is in the context of colonization (19th century) or military engagements (20th century).
Greg Grandin has provided us with a history of a failed business endeavor undertaken by Henry Ford in the early 20th century. Ford had this idea to expand his business ventures into Brazil by building a rubber plantation to meet the Ford company's ever growing need for latex.
As other reviewers have pointed out, Grandin does not skimp on the details - he sometimes goes into excruciating detail about minor events. This, however, is part of the charm of the book - it gives the reader a true sense into what transpired during the years that the Ford company backed this place called Fordlandia. Grandin's account demonstrates how Ford tried to export his successful business model into a foreign country (and an entirely different industry) with no real success.
There was only one thing I didn't like about the book, and that was the imbalanced treatment - most of the book told the story of the 'rise' of Fordlandia, but only a short section addressed the real reasons for the fall. Naturally, Grandin tried to setup the fall by explaining why the setup was doomed to fail, but I just didn't get enough of a sense of the actual reasons why Ford abandoned the area, or any analytical insight into why Ford decided, after all those years, to leave.
All told, it was a good book - one well worth reading, save for the slightly unbalanced discussion of the 'rise' versus the 'fall'.
Suburban America in Brazil?
Fordlandia was an interesting read. I had certainly never heard of Ford's misguided attempt at establishing a rubber plantation in Brazil prior to reading this historical novel. This book provides an extensive and comprehensive detail of Ford's entire operation in Brazil, and also discuses at length the consequential effects on environment and the surrounding peoples. It was extremely interesting to read about the struggles and difficulties concerning the undertaking of such an improbable task as to create a master planned development in the heart of the Amazonian basin.
While I appreciated, to a degree, the in-depth bios of the various players, I felt that those sections were sometimes overdrawn and lengthy. I understand the need to establish personality, motives, etc. but in some cases the anecdotes just went on for far too long. I did find it interesting, however, that the book tracks the development of Fordlandia in parallel with Ford's own life and changes in his perspectives on values, ideals, and lifestyles.
I took away one star for writing style. While the content is interesting, the execution is somewhat sloppy, as others have noted. The text is not truly a pleasure to read as other historical novels I have read in the past. It is, in short, not the page-turner it had the potential to be given the material. In some places it was just difficult getting through to the next page....
Filled with Ford vision leaving Henry with a black eye
Fordlandia provides a view of Henry Ford that reveals him to be an all too human combination of innovation, ignorance and arrogance. While not surprising in the sense that Henry Ford was, after all, just a man out to make a buck and impose his personality on everything, the book makes it quite clear Ford was a one trick pony. (His one true innovation was to perceive the same 'interchangeable parts' model used successfully for gun manufacture would work just as well for automobiles and could further be extended to interchangeable and expendable people.) Outside his factory and off the assembly line, Ford manufactured a non stop string of failures with the Fordlandia fiasco simply being one of many. Perhaps the real lesson of Fordlandia is how often business moguls are actually extremely limited in their vision. That myopia may make them millionaires but it too often impairs them from seeing the world and the people in it as anything more than machinery to generate money and facilitate or impede illusions.
 Unreadable
I was very excited to read this after listening to an interview with the author on NPR's Fresh Air program. However, once I started reading it I was massively disappointed. The author, unfortunately, writes in a way that makes even the most interesting topic dull beyond belief. I was only able to force my way through the first 250 pages before I finally gave up. His lengthy diversion concerning the murals that were painted in Detroit of Ford's factories was uninteresting, poorly written, and not at all related to to the topic of the book.
Again, I was very excited to read this and quickly changed my mind once I began reading it, as you have to fight your way through every page, which is unacceptable for any book let alone one with a topic as bizarre and interesting as this one.
Slight, Entertaining History of Ford's Amazon City
I had the pleasure of visiting the remains of Fordlandia back in the early 1990s while on an Amazon cruise, so I was intrigued by this book.
However, while I found the history entertaining, informative, and at times amusing, I was left wanting by the end.
While the vintage photos were enjoyable, as well as anecdotes about efforts to introduce Ford's Midwestern social planning in a jungle environment, I found the narrative to meander and the author reaching to find some grand meaning in the venture that just doesn't seem to be there.
Is Fordlandia really about the "history of capitalism," as he writes in the epilogue?
If so, I must have missed it in the book, or else it's just not that persuasively established.
Either way the book is a quirky, slight, enjoyable history of Ford's jungle adventure, but not an epic historical retelling of anything particularly profound in American history.
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