Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg GrandinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
A fascinating modern Heart of Darkness in Amazonia like The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey or The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. While Ford never went to see the ungainly rubber plantation with small town design elements he created in the jungle, like he did his towns in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the over ambitious concern limped into and thru WW II with its inventor's worldview. While this is obviously a story of the Ford enterprise in Brazil, it also adds depth to the popular picture of Henry Ford. After all, while he may have said "history is bunk!", he was also an obsessive antiquarian starting the Henry Ford Museum and puttering around in Greenfield Village while resisting technological innovation with an almost fetishistic yearning for the artifacts and modes of the past.
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