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Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City

Amazon.com Price:  $8.94 (as of 12/05/2019 16:20 PST- Details)

Description

The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town The usa in the heart of the Amazon

In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man on the planet, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention used to be to grow rubber, but the project hastily evolved into a more ambitious bid to export The usa itself, in conjunction with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets.

Fordlandia, as the settlement used to be referred to as, quickly became the website of an epic clash. On one side used to be the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system in the world. Ford’s early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia’s eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest.

More than a parable of one man’s arrogant attempt to force his will on the flora and fauna, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone The usa that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford’s great delusion used to be not that the Amazon might be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained.

Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

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