by Greg Grandin
First published 2009
In 1927, Henry Ford purchased land in the Brazilian Amazon twice the size of Delaware. The world's richest man planned to grow rubber, but his vision expanded into something far more ambitious: recreating small-town America in the jungle. Greg Grandin chronicles how Ford's settlement, dubbed Fordlandia, became an epic confrontation between American industrial efficiency and the Amazon's complex ecosystem. Ford imposed time clocks and square dances on indigenous workers who had other ideas about how to live. They rejected his midwestern Puritanism and transformed the place into a wild tropical boomtown. The rubber plantation ultimately failed, but Grandin reveals how Ford's experiment foreshadowed modern practices destroying the rainforest. This history exposes Ford's deeper delusion: not that the Amazon could be tamed, but that capitalism's forces, once unleashed, could still be controlled. The book captures Ford's desperate attempt to preserve the small-town America that his own factory system had helped destroy.
Genres: history, 20th-century, business, non-fiction, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, man-vs-nature
Setting: Amazon, Brazil
Period: 1927
416 pages · Hardcover · Metropolitan Books