Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed a marginal event — Henry Ford’s failed attempt to establish a gigantic agricultural/industrial complex in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon Basin — and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry’s contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism.
“Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City” is a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist’s sense of pace and an eye for character. Ford put up $125,000 to acquire 2.5 million acres along an Amazon tributary 500 miles from the Atlantic. There he envisioned a vast rubber plantation. It was a disaster from the start. By the time Ford Motor sold Fordlandia back to the Brazilian government in 1945 for $244,200, the company had spent, in inflation-adjusted figures, roughly $1 billion on the project.
Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
