Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City,   ISBN:9780312429621

Customer Rating: 

Learning about old Henry Ford is an exercise chock full of surprises. He came up with many important innovations in the automobile industry and built an industrial giant that survives to this day. It also appears that he had a dark side too - I refer to his activities relating to his apparent extreme anti-semitism. Now, I see this book about his attempt to establish a rubber enterprise in the jungles of Brazil. Crazy perhaps, but you've got to admire his gumption.

Maybe we (I mean Americans, but others maybe too as well) can all learn something very important from this book, even though Ford's plan eventually failed.

Customer Rating: 

I thought Greg Grandin's Fordlandia was a solid effort. To be honest, I read this book after reading in rapid succession The Lost City of Z and The Thief at the End of the World - both of which cover quite a bit of the same ground and I have to admit to some Amazon and Rubber Trade fatigue setting in. This may have unfairly colored my perception of this book.

I don't have a great deal to add that hasn't already been covered elsewhere so I'll limit my comments. While I liked the book, thought the topic was fascinating and the research comprehensive, it was not one of those non-fiction works that grabbed me and dragged me along like a freight train with a "can't put it down" narrative. And maybe that's the primary thing that was missing for me...I never felt emotionally invested in the outcome, nor did I feel we were building toward something. The book is an interesting and pleasantly written presentation of the facts, and maybe there's a great story in it, but I thought this book sometimes sacrificed a great yarn by being so painstakingly thorough.

Customer Rating: 

Well written review of the rubber plantation experiment by Ford Motor Company in the 20's 30's and 40's
The book was very detailed and offered personal insites into the amazon jungle experience and how Henry Ford ran and expanded his business empire.
I was mostly unaware of the social experiment side of the Henry Ford story prior to reading this book.
I enjoyed the old and new photos of the plantation and of the Michigan UP expansion and the map of the area in Brazil where the bulk of the story takes place.

Customer Rating: 

If the author's purpose was to convince people to hate Henry Ford more, then he may have succeeded with some who live on one coast or the other, or humanities professors at public universities. The book truly is well-researched, well-documented and well-written. Once I got into it, it was actually fun to read. But it took me a while to get used to the author's cheap pot-shots, condescending sarcasm and intellectually dishonest, dissembling analyses. The attempt to parallel Ford's jungle adventure with the war in Iraq is a prime example. Another one was: Ford claimed his foremost concern was the welfare of his workers and their families; however he opposed unionization. This, apparently, is supposed to speak for itself. But does it mean that Ford did not really care for his workers or does it mean that he was not very intelligent because he didn't understand the inherent goodness of labor cartels? Did Ford actually think that giving workers good jobs with full benefits entitled him to run his own company?? After that point in the book, I began to enjoy how the fascinating and very scholarly historical presentation alternated with laugh-out-loud absurdity. For example, Ford was able, 20 years posthumously, to control the conduct of the Vietnam War through the person Robert McNamara; Ford is revealed as world-class evil villain by his accepting a medal from Adolph Hitler, which the author insinuates was a reward for Ford's approval of Hitler's as-of-then unhatched plan to incinerate 6 million people whom Ford didn't like either; Ford, with his ill-fated rubber plantation is continuing to destroy 'our' rain forest (and hence in years to come all life on earth as we know it) because crooked loggers are milling lumber 60 years after his death at a sawmill built on the site of Fordlandia; changing the landscape, if undertaken by a private individual such as Henry Ford, is evil. However if his plan to do so, (including extensive planning and engineering) is later used by the U.S. government and implemented as planned (with an important government name like Tennessee Valley Authority instead of a dumb farm-boy name like Fordville) then that is nothing less than heroic. Indeed, the author's reverence of the Roosevelt government is overshadowed only by his glee over the fact that the evil, illiterate, racist, anti-semitic .... CAPITALIST was not paid a dime for all the money, time and effort he and many others put into creating the plan. The juxtaposition of the U.S. government using Ford's idea for this social experiment, after dismissively rejecting it as stupid, and humiliating Ford to boot against pre-war Germany giving him a medal for creating manufacturing processes which were used with great success by the Third Reich could have been used to much greater effect. I'd like to think that the author considered it and then rejected it as too ridiculous, but it wouldn't have been the most ridiculous thing in the book.

Customer Rating: 

Fordlandia provided insights into an American legend with a very checkered history. The motive to start a rubber plant in the Amazon was a colossal disaster and the strategies to save it were also ill-fated from one turn to the next. Ford was a dichotomy in and of himself - an innovator and wildly successful businessman in one way and a wayward idealist with dangerous power issues on the other. Fordlandia is probably not part of the orientation program when hiring on at Ford as it illustrates a myriad of wreckless decisions about vertically integrating a business. Ford sort of believed he was infallable due to his successes and he was resolute to make Fordlandia work at any cost. It didn't play out that way as millions and millions of dollars were poured into a worthless white elepant that caused death, media mishaps, and to some extent the unraveling of a charasmatic icon. Very entertaining to read and learn from this piece.