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Title: Fordlandia

Subtitle: The Rise and Fall of Henry Fords Forgotten Jungle City

Author: Greg Grandin

Narrator: Jonathan Davis

Format: Unabridged

Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-17-10

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 128 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, soon became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the lean, austere car magnate; on the other, the Amazon, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Indigenous workers rejected Ford's midwestern Puritanism, turning the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. And his efforts to apply a system of regimented mass production to the Amazon's diversity resulted in a rash environmental assault that foreshadowed many of the threats laying waste to the rain forest today.

More than a parable of one mans arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Greg Grandin's Fordlandia is "a quintessentially American fable". (Time).

Editorial Reviews:

Fordlandia is a wide-ranging history not only of Henry Fords problem-plagued foray into the Amazonian rainforest, but also of his place in advancing mechanized manufacturing. While the jungle experience did not make a lasting imprint on the Ford Companys existence, the perfection of assembly-line processes, the invention of machines to replace workers, and Henry Fords desire to control all facets of his automobile production process certainly combined to change the way goods are manufactured and life for workers around the world. Jonathan Davis aptly takes listeners through the story as the book first details Henry Fords rise to world prominence through the debacle of Fordlandia, and finally to Fords legacy of multinational corporations and mechanized labor.

The experience of Fordlandia brings forth Davis many skills as a gifted narrator. While his even voice tells the tale, he offers engaging and enjoyable moments as he describes various characters who helped make Fords poorly thought-out excursion into virgin rainforest the misery that it was. Davis reads excerpts from the letters botantist Carl LaRue sent to Henry Ford from Brazil, detailing the forlorn existence of the natives who would, supposedly, benefit from Fords insistence on a workforce that adhered to his personal Puritan values. Davis also reads the poetry of George Washington Sears, whose work describes a Brazilian workers revolt, and of Elizabeth Bishop, who put the Amazon Rivers untouched beauty into verse.

Mostly though, Davis introduces listeners to the wheelers and dealers who finessed the Brazilian land deal. According to author Grandin, that deal snookered the richest man in the world into paying for land he could have gotten for free. Later, Davis voices upper- and mid-level Ford managers who saw opportunities for money and power in time spent at the struggling Amazonian rubber plantation.

Fordlandia has it all: from American ingenuity, pride, wealth, and stubbornness to the tendency of some towards exploitation, greed, and nativism. Davis gives voice to Grandins words as he describes that moment in American history when the country changed from being mostly agrarian pioneers to factory workers; When American businessmen and factory owners began looking farther than the shores of the United States and saw income possibilities in foreign countries.