Fordlandia, The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin

In 1927, an increasingly eccentric Henry Ford purchased a tract of land about the size of Tennessee in the remote Amazon. Ostensibly the purpose was to build a rubber plantation, but Mr. Ford also desired to create the ideal city, a dream that had eluded him in North America.

If it wasn’t just all so incredibly wasteful, the story of Fordlandia would be comical. Almost everything that could go wrong did, and the Ford Corporation’s distrust of “experts” and the locals only exacerbated the wrongs.

Approximately ten years and millions of dollars later, Fordlandia, was abandoned to the US government.

This is a great read.

WHAT OTHER REVIEWERS SAY

The Wall Street Journal: “Greg Grandin’s riveting account of this ‘forgotten jungle city’ demonstrates that in business, as well as in affairs of state, the means may be abundant but the ends still unachievable.”

WHO WROTE IT

Greg Grandin is the author of Empire’s Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. He is a professor of history at New York University and a Guggenheim fellow.