Gandin, an NYU professor of Latin American history, offers the thoroughly remarkable story of Henry Ford's attempt, from the 1920s through 1945, to transform part of Brazil's Amazon River basin into a rubber plantation and eponymous American-style company town: Fordlandia. Gandin has found a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictory parts of Henry Ford: the pacifist, the internationalist, the virulent anti-Semite, the $5-a-day friend of the workingman, the anti-union crusader, the man who ushered America into the industrial age yet rejected the social changes that followed urbanization. Both infuriating and fascinating, Ford is only a piece of the Fordlandia story. The follies of colonialism and the testing of the belief that the Amazon-where "7,882 organisms could be found on any given five square miles"-could be made to produce rubber with the reliability of an auto assembly line makes a surprisingly dramatic tale. Although readers know that Fordlandia will return to the jungle, the unfolding of this unprecedented experiment is compelling. Grandin concludes that "Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism-and by extension Americanism." Readers may find it a cautionary tale for the 21st century. 54 b&w photos. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In the 1920s, a cartel of Dutch and English rubber barons held a monopoly on the world's supply of rubber. The sole source of rubber was the South American tree Hevea brasiliensi, whose sap is natural latex. Smugglers had secreted seeds of the plant out of the Brazilian rain forest and created plantations in East Asia, monopolizing the supply of this essential commodity. In an effort to break this cartel, the great industrialist Henry Ford, who needed rubber for tires, purchased a land tract the size of Connecticut in the Amazon, intending to produce the largest rubber plantation on earth. The result was Fordlandia, a massively overreaching project that also sought to create a utopian Midwestern town in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. The project was a massive failure, as the American team was unprepared for the brutal challenges of unpredictable weather and an onslaught of diseases and insects that would ultimately destroy both the crop of rubber trees and the lives of everyone involved. Grandin's account is an epic tale of a clash between cultures, values, man, and nature.--Siegfried, David Copyright 2009 Booklist

Riverside Avenue in Fordlandia, with the Tapajós River to the right. THE Amazon has always proved fertile soil for extravagant utopian fantasy. Victorian explorers, American industrialists, ideologues and missionaries all projected their dreams and ideas onto this terra incognita, this untamed wilderness of exotic possibility. For Europe and North America, the vastness of South America was a focus for romance, discovery and potential profit, and also a canvas on which to paint a new world according to individual belief. Elisabeth Nietzsche, the sister of the philosopher, plunged into the jungles of Paraguay in 1886 intent on creating her own vegetarian Aryan republic, spurred on by the anti-Semitic effusions of Richard Wagner. Theodore Roosevelt predicted the great river system could be harnessed to create "populous manufacturing communities." Nelson Rockefeller thought the 4,000 miles of the Amazon might be cut into canals. The British explorer Col. Percy Fawcett plunged into the jungle in 1925, convinced he would find an ancient city that had once flourished there, and was never seen again. Scores of would-be rescuers followed his trail and vanished too. The Amazon had a way of swallowing up dreams. Elisabeth Nietzsche left her flyblown, half-starved New Germany to rot, and scurried home to distort her brother's philosophical legacy. Roosevelt returned from his Amazon expedition of 1914 declaring the jungle to be "sinister and evil," a place inimical to man. Alongside the myth of the Amazon's boundless opportunities grew another: the jungle as impenetrable nature, immune to modernity, a world savage and primeval where each successive conquistador arrives puffed with pride, and is conquered. With "Fordlandia," Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, tells a haunting story that falls squarely into this tradition: Henry Ford's failed endeavor to export Main Street America to the jungles of Brazil. Fordlandia was a commercial enterprise, intended to extract raw material for the production of motor cars, but it was framed as a civilizing mission, an attempt to build the ideal American society within the Amazon. As described in this fascinating account, it was also the reflection of one man's personality - arrogant, brilliant and very odd. In 1927, Ford, the richest man in the world, needed rubber to make tires, hoses and other parts for his cars. Rubber does not grow in Michigan, and European, producers enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the rubber trade because of their Asian colonies. So, typically, the car magnate decided to grow his own. The site chosen for Ford's new rubber plantation was an area of some 2.5 million acres on the banks of the Tapajós River, a tributary of the Amazon about 600 miles from the Atlantic. It took Ford's agents approximately 18 hours to reach the place by riverboat from the nearest town. Ford's vision was a replica Midwestern town, with modern plumbing, hospitals, schools, sidewalks, tennis courts and even a golf course. There would be no drink or other forms of immorality, but gardening for all and chaste dances every week. Fordlandia would not just make car production more efficient. By applying the principles of rational organization to turn out goods at an ever faster pace, Ford would also be improving the lives of those who worked in the new town, bringing health and wealth to American managers and Brazilian laborers alike. In Grandin's words, this outpost of modern capitalism was to be "an example of his particular American dream, of how Ford-style capitalism - high wages, humane benefits and moral improvement - could bring prosperity to a benighted land." That blueprint may have worked in Ford's River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Mich. It most emphatically did not work in the jungle. Instead of a miniature but improved North American city, what Ford created was a broiling, pestilential hell-hole of disease, vice and violence, closer to Dodge City than peaceable Dearborn. The American overseers found it hard to retain employees, who tended to wander off after earning enough to satisfy their immediate wants. Those who stayed died in large numbers, from viper bites, malaria, yellow fever and numerous other tropical afflictions. Prohibition was supposed to be rigorously upheld, but after a day spent hacking at the encircling jungle, the workers headed to the bars and bordellos that sprang up around the site. Knife fights erupted; venereal disease was rife. Along with prohibition, Ford's other rules were also resented, particularly the imposed diet of brown rice, whole-wheat bread and tinned peaches. When a new cafeteria was introduced in place of waiter service, the men rioted, destroying the mess hall and wrecking every vehicle on the property. Meanwhile, some of the Americans brought in to run the project went mad. One man hurled himself from a boat into a nest of crocodiles. The wife of one official recalled the flying bugs with "claws just like lobsters." Grandin paints a Conradian portrait of Einar Oxholm, the Norwegian ship's captain appointed manager of Fordlandia. We see him sipping rum (in defiance of company policy) as the fledgling community disintegrated. Oxholm was honest, but otherwise entirely unsuited to his task, knowing nothing whatever about cultivating rubber or managing men on land. He would finally return to the United States, leaving behind the graves of four of his children. Indeed, Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" resonates through every page of this book, as the white men struggle and succumb to the jungle. In 1929, two Ford employees, Johansen, a Scot, and Tolksdorf, a German, headed upriver with orders to collect rubber seeds. Instead, they went on an alcoholic bender, marooned their cook on a deserted island and ended up in the tiny town of Barra. There Johansen, the self-proclaimed "rubber seed king of the upper rivers," bought some perfume from a trading post and was seen chasing goats, cows and chickens, attempting to anoint the animals with perfume and shouting: "Mr. Ford has lots of money; you might as well smell good too." A drunken man spraying perfume into the jungle is an oddly fitting image for the entire enterprise. The great carmaker himself witnessed none of this. He never set foot in the town that bore his name, yet his powerful, contradictory personality influenced every aspect of the project. The story of Fordlandia is a biography of Ford in relief, the man who championed small-town America but did more to destroy it than any other, the pioneer who aimed to lift workers from drudgery but pioneered a method of soul-destroying mass production that rendered them mere cogs. Ford was obsessed, among other things, by Thomas Edison, soybeans, antiques and order. He hated unions, cows, Wall Street, Franklin Roosevelt and Jews. He also, fatally, despised experts. Ford's Amazon team had plenty of able men, but as Grandin observes, "what it didn't have was a horticulturalist, agronomist, botanist, microbiologist, entomologist or any other person who might know something about jungle rubber and its enemies" - the lace bugs and leaf blight that laid siege to the rubber trees, the swarms of caterpillars that left areas of the plantation "as bare as bean poles." Given the obstacles, it is astonishing how much the creators of Fordlandia did achieve. During its brief heyday, Fordlandia boasted red fire hydrants on neat streets, running water, a sawmill, a water tower and weekly square dancing. But the intransigence of the jungle, changes in the world economy and war ensured its ignominious demise. The Ford Motor Company invested $20 million in Fordlandia. In 1945 it was sold to the Brazilian government for $244,200. Ben Macintyre's latest book is "Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal."

Innovative automobile manufacturer Henry Ford had a unique vision that led to the large-scale application of assembly-line production processes, industry-leading wage rates, and sourcing of raw materials from the absolute base. Thus, once his production lines were churning out over a million cars per year, Ford sought to cut costs for tires by acquiring land in Brazil to grow rubber trees. In doing so, he set in motion a series of events chronicled in detail for the first time in this book. Though visionary, Ford did not really understand politics or diversity of human culture. This led to a series of missteps where time clocks, midday work hours, and other aspects of exported culture failed to resonate with the indigenous Brazilian workers. Instead of an efficient rubber farm, Fordlandia wreaked havoc in a space twice the size of Delaware; it was a spectacular failure. Workers eventually revolted, and the Brazilian army was brought in to restore order. Ford is iconic in American history and biography, the subject of over 100 biographies, but this particular misadventure has never been well documented until now. All readers of history and biography should consider.-Eric C. Shoaf, Univ. of Texas at San Antonio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Unlike Henry Ford, this ambitious work achieves most of its goals. Grandin (NYU) details the automaker's star-crossed dream of applying Fordism's mass-production methods and social engineering to a vast Amazonian plantation producing rubber for his corporation. The project was mostly a failure through neglect of ecology, agronomic research, entomology, parasitology, and local social relations. A 1930 riot over food and working conditions caused much damage and temporarily drove away the US staff. From 1928, Ford invested $20 million in Fordlandia; in 1945, valued at $8 million, it was sold to the Brazilian government for $244,200. The author combines histories of business, labor, technology, environment, international relations, even art (Diego Rivera's Detroit murals) with wit and entertaining style. Among numerous mini-biographies he offers, Grandin scathingly critiques Harry Bennett, Ford's brutal security chief whose use of intimidation and violence poisoned American labor relations for decades. A chronology would help readers navigate the many leaps in time and space; partial reliance on published primary and secondary sources suggests there might be future revision. Such caveats aside, this looks to be history at its best. Summing Up: Essential. All collections; AP high school students and above. T. P. Johnson University of Massachusetts, Boston

Henry Ford's doomed attempt to establish a rubber industry and an attendant "work of civilization" in the rain forests of Brazil. The rising price of rubber and a threatened British-led cartel inspired the famously independent Henry Ford in 1927 to purchase a Connecticut-sized plot of land for the purpose of growing his own. The South American leaf blight and the advent of synthetic rubbers forced the company to abandon Fordlandia in 1945, long after Ford had poured millions of dollars and years of strenuous effort into the project. So why did he persist? Grandin (Latin American History/New York Univ.; Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, 2006, etc.) convincingly argues that, for Ford, the enterprise was more than a purely economic venture. It was a missionary application of Ford-style capitalismhigh wages, humane benefits, moral improvementto a backward land. Ford's belief that he could harmonize industry and agriculture was always at war with the forces he had unleashed in the United Statesmass-produced, affordable cars that encouraged mobility and fear induced in workers by hired thugs like Harry Bennett, who assured that the company would remain nonunion. With his vision of an industrial arcadia slipping away at homedue to what Grandin acutely terms "a blithe indifference to difference"Ford attempted to construct in the Amazon a world he had helped obliterate in America. The author follows a succession of Ford representatives and managers overwhelmed by the challenges of doing business where the implacable terrain, jungle diseases, mounting costs, floundering construction, government bumbling and worker resistance all conspired to sink the project. The plantation's original motive, to grow rubber, gave way to an unsustainable sociological experiment, which despite its amenitiesweekly dances, movies, tennis courts, garden clubs, schools and hospitalsmade no economic sense and became a mockery of the Ford Motor Company's reputation for orderliness, efficiency and synchronization. Works both as a nice bit of recovered history and a parable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.