Henry Ford was a crazy and stubborn guy. He despised cows because they were so inefficient, and made everyone eat/drink soy products instead. He bought historical places and had them transported, whole, into a historic village in which he hid on bad days.

Also: white people were his obvious favorite.

This crazy thread wound through Ford's life and into the Amazon, where he decided he was going to start a rubber plantation.

He had an odd dislike of "experts," so he didn't actually hire anyone who knew anything about:
a) city planning
b) the Amazon
or
c) rubber planting.

The city -- in the Amazon -- where rubber was supposed to be planted -- failed.

So spectacularly it was kind of hilarious, except for the fact that people (a LOT of people, MANY of whom were children) died.

No one knew what food to import/grow,
how to store things,
how to build appropriately for the region,
what to do about the illnesses or pests,
how to control racial tensions,
how to impose prohibition (!!!),
how to keep people occupied,
how to keep the staff from quitting,
or -- for the love of God --
how to get that damn rubber thing up and running.

Ford, who never actually visited the place once, just kept throwing money at the place because he was too stubborn to give up. It never turned anything remotely close to a profit. He lost something like $28 million on the project, and this is in dollars from that time -- during the Great Depression.

Sadly, this book is a slightly dull read. It's not a particularly gripping rendition of what is, at the end of the day, a really cool story. It's a four- or five-star tale with a two-star writing style.

This is an excellent book for anyone interested in globalization or American industry and its influence in the world. Henry Ford was a fascinating character, and the story of his attempt to build a plantation and American town in the middle of the Amazon is a fascinating look at how companies like Ford (Firestone, and the United Fruit Co.) set the stage for what we consider globalization today.

Though the descriptions of "Fordlandia," as Ford's Amazon settlement is known, and the events that occurred there offer an interesting look at an American company abroad, the book's true strength is its examination of Ford, his life, his beliefs, and his attempts to create his own version of utopia both in the Amazon and back in Michigan.

This felt like a well developed look at Fordism and its bleeding into control of human life. I enjoyed Grandin's ability to tie what was happening with the failed Fordlandia rubber and social project to what was happening in Brazil at large, as well as in Dearborn, Michigan. I think Grandin paints a portrait of Henry Ford and his employees from the United States as individually flawed human beings. I wish there would have been more from the perspective of Brazilians working the doomed rubber plantations and watching the repeated turnover and chaos.

It's nonfiction that at times reads as smoothly as fiction.

Would recommend.

Fascinating review of a little-known expansion in American economic 20th century history - Henry Ford's attempt to build a utopian-like city in the Amazon jungle in the 1930s and efforts to manufacture rubber for his vast automobile industry. Book does a great job of profiling the ecentricities of Ford along with the auto industry and contrasting how American industrial successes did not transfer well down into South America.

A well laid out and deeply researched chronicle on a little known social engineering project of Henry Ford.

This sums up working with Henry Ford by Charles Lindbergh.

"Their policy is to act first and plan afterward, usually overlooking completely essential details. Result: a tremendous increase of cost and effort unnecessarily.”

Ford in a lot of ways transformed manufacturing and the work force, but he wasn't great at conforming to something he didn't understand. From the very start of his grand experiment in the Amazon was a disaster. He sent people who had never seen a jungle to plant and build cities, like they had in Michigan. The Amazon is no Michigan. Planting season is essential. Knowing the fungus and parasites is essential. Knowing that you can only deliver goods in the wet season is essential (the river could not handle cargo ships in dry season because there wasn't enough water). People who live off land do not need steady work. They don't go hungry because they eat what is naturally grown. I felt horrible for the families sent by the Fords to make this all work. The frustration, push back and disasters was not worth it for Ford to save money on tires. in the end, they dumped about $25 million in 1920 dollars and begged the government to take it back after Henry Ford's death for $245000. Ford is looney. At best anti-Semitic, racist and a poor father. In addition, this all came about because of the action of Winston Churchill. Of course it did, all my reading ends at Churchill. Intentional or not.

This is the real Bioshock, or Atlas Shrugged. Not the chintzy-feeling utopia of greed that frequently characterizes the celebration of the great industrial captain, but rather stark and total failure. It was a pure arrogance-so pure that it was never even acknowledged-that led Henry Ford to assume that he could tame the Amazon basin as easily as he did Michigan. Grandin's telling of the forgotten Fordlandia has a whiff of fable throughout. His center though is always on Ford himself. As the text progresses Ford gradually slips from his public puritanical pacifist to an increasingly withdrawn, anti-semite, with a disturbing fascist streak, eventually shutting himself within his museum/Potemkin village of "Yesterday's America" filtered out into Ford's own delusion of how it looked.
Grandin's work is on one level an excellent history and biography, but also resonates with our own current failures to recreate America (or rather a selective America) elsewhere in the world.

Interesting. Very dense. I don't need to go to the amazon ever.

Fascinating look at social engineering, some of Henry Ford's interesting thoughts and the pros and cons of being a force of change.

Count this one in the learn something new every day category. I'd never heard of Ford doing this sort of thing and the book gives great insight into Ford the man as well as this attempted project. Loads of interesting tidbits about how stuff is done as well, such as efforts at tree grafting to find the right trees to produce rubber and survive multiple bugs and more that were attacking the trees. An informative read.