Rate this book

Fordlandia: The Rise And Fall Of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (2009)

by Greg Grandin(Favorite Author)

3.54 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0805082360 (ISBN13: 9780805082364)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Metropolitan Books

review 1: A fascinating study of a forgotten incident in American business history. Henry Ford, in a continued effort to vertically integrate and impose his vision of society on a greater number of peoples, acquired in the late 1920s a substantial tract of Amazon property in which to grow rubber. Unfortunately for this project, Henry Ford was the decision maker, and his refusal to involve experts and to work with the ecology and local population doomed it.
review 2: Honestly, I'd mark this as a 3 1/2 star rating. "Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City" is a breathtaking, comprehensive work. It not only tells the story of Fordlandia (coupled throughout with photographs of the town), which Ford had built in 1927, and abandoned in 1945, but d... moreives deep into the intricate back-stories, lives, and personalities of Ford and the men surrounding him. Grandin does an excellent job showing us what an intensely complicated figure Henry Ford once. A man who embodied small-town ideals and lived in a world 20 years dead by the time Fordlandia was built, Henry Ford was unfortunate enough to watch himself grow obsolete. Grandin does not allow the reader to become too steeped in nostalgia or pity, reminding us that while Ford was idealistic and innovative, he was also narrow-minded, sanctimonious, and genuinely bigoted and mean-spirited down to his core. I have two substantial criticisms of "Fordlandia". The first is its repetitive nature. Grandin often makes the same point again and again with no addition of information, sometimes in a digressive fashion. In doing so, it almost feels as if he his padding his work (372 pages before the notes, acknowledgements, and index begin). The 2nd criticism I have is his ending. Most of the book exhaustively details the circumstances leading to the creation of Fordlandia, and the early years of the city itself. Grandin spares no expense in providing a rich narrative of the years 1927-1937 or so, so why not the same attention to 1937-1945? In a short space, he quickly wraps up Fordlandia's decline. It reads as hasty, when we could have been treated to an admittedly longer but much more in-depth account of the city, following the ambitious standard that Grandin had upheld to that point.Like I said before, while those two criticisms are heavy, this is a good book. I definitely recommend it to other history buffs with a 3.5 star rating. less

Download links for: Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

Advertising