Download Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City AudioBook Free
The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic try to recreate small-town America in the heart and soul of the AmazonIn 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man on the planet, bought a tract of land double the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His motive was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly advanced into a more ambitious bet to export America itself, along with its golf programs, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor domestic plumbing, and Model Ts moving down broad avenues. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site associated with an epic clash. Using one side was the car magnate, slim, austere, the person who reduced industrial creation to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, luxurious, the most sophisticated ecological system on earth. Ford's early on success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous personnel, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, transformed the area into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the routines that today are laying waste materials to the rainfall forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant try to push his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a needy quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford stock system have much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly recognized background, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the makes of capitalism, once released, might yet be included.
Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Prize Finalist for Nonfiction.
