very interesting-didn't know the amazon had excercised it's famous and deadly pull on Ford as well
picturing the square dances and white picket fences in the heart of the jungle was fun-though I doubt living there was ( )

We read this for my face to face book club. I suggested it, and it was chosen by a vote.

I was the only person who finished it.

That tells you something. Either it tells you I'm the only idiot. Or it tells you this book was pretty dense and dull. You decide.

Grandin tells the story of Henry Ford's quest to create a rubber plantation in the Amazon. Let's just say it was an ill-conceived idea at best. Grandin weaves in a lot about Ford and a lot about his ideas on capitalism and his social experiments and how these all came into play in Brazil.

But mostly, it seemed to me, the idea of growing rubber in a systematic way was just doomed mostly by Nature herself as it was nearly impossible to grow trees that resisted rot and insects while yielding high amounts of rubber. Add a populace who wasn't really used to working 9 to 5 jobs and some incompetent management . . .and the whole undertaking was basically a fiasco.

This book could have been a LOT more interesting had Grandin told it through one person's eyes or created more of a narrative, but he didn't, and so you really had to force yourself to pay attention.

It gets 3 stars for the clear depth of research and for some interesting segments about Ford himself and about bugs. ( )

A Baroque expression of industrial hubris, is a good definition of this strange effort on the part of the prominent American industrialist. Henry Ford was intent on controlling as many parts of his industrial supplies as he could. In the mid nineteen twenties he decided to turn his attention to the latex he needed to build the tires on his cars. He therefore decided to revive a rubber industry that was in serious trouble in Brazil, the original home of the exported latex trade. To offset the commanding market presence of the Indo-chinese and the Indonesians in his current market, he decided to take ownership of a large patch of the original home of the rubber tree, and create a mordern, and model community that would revitalize the South American trade in the resource. Mr. Grandin has carefully researched, and clearly explained all the reasons for the almost total failure of this twelve year effort. ( )

Henry Ford once tried to build an entire new city in the Amazon solely to harvest rubber for tires. He spent zillions of dollars and didn't produce any rubber at all. This is not only a textbook case of American hubris but also a really fascinating look at Ford and his contemporaries. One of the more interesting "hidden stories" of modern industry. ( )

I gave it three stars because I liked it, but I did not love it. On the positive, it is a very interesting book on a very interesting topic. On the negative, there is a lot of small detail that can slow down the narrative a bit. At moments, I did skim through the book. The story itself is fascinating: Henry Ford decides to build and settle a town in the Brazilian Amazon jungle in order to have a place that supplies rubber for his car tires, thus bypassing other suppliers. This sounds good in theory. In practice, Ford went into the enterprise with a lot of ignorance. In many ways, it was not the jungle that defeated Ford. Ford more often than not was his worst enemy from his own ignorance about Brazil, the local customs, so on to the people he hired for the operation, who more often than not were even more clueless.

In addition to the story of Fordlandia, we also get a very good picture of Henry Ford, the company he created (Ford Motor Company), the revolution in industry he created (the assembly line and the idea of a lot of workers to make one small widget for a larger product at a time), and the time period (after World War I into the 1920s. Ford is portrayed as a man in conflict. On the one hand, he thinks industry is a savior, and yet he wants to return to a pastoral time that he himself helped destroy with his industry. It is a bit tragic yet fascinating to read. Fordlandia itself was finally sold off and turned over to the Brazilians after World War II. And no, this is not really a spoiler). You also get a bit U.S. as well as Brazilian and Latin American history in the process.

Overall, the author did a lot of research for this book, and he packs a lot of material in it. At times, it does get to be a bit much (thus why I skimmed some parts). Yet I still liked the book, and I enjoyed learning a few new things because of it. It is a book I would gladly recommend.

Final note: If you like this book, here are other books I have read that may appeal to readers as well:

* The Lost City of Z Actually, Percy Fawcett, subject of this book, is mentioned in Grandin's book a few times. Also, this is another book about the Amazon and man going into it attempting to conquer the jungle.

* Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche. This story is a biography of the philosopher's sister and the story of the Aryan utopian community her husband and her established in Paraguay. Again, man, or woman in this case, trying to conquer the jungle to create a utopia. In some ways, very similar to what Ford wanted with Fordlandia.

* The News from Paraguay. This is fiction, a novel about one of Paraguay's dictators and his Irish mistress.

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