Book : Fordlandia The Rise And Fall Of Henry Fords Forgotten

-Titulo Original : Fordlandia The Rise And Fall Of Henry Fords Forgotten Jungle City

-Fabricante :

Picador

-Descripcion Original:

About the Author Greg Grandin is the author of The End of the Myth, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Fordlandia, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His widely acclaimed books also include The Last Colonial Massacre, Kissingers Shadow, and The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft and Beveridge awards in American history. He is Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin comes the stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the AmazonIn 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, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Fords early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandias eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one mans arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Fords great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction. Review “Grandin tells a gripping story of high hopes and deep failure, a saga that in some ways is a morality tale for the American century.” The Boston Globe“Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed just such a marginal event. . . and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industrys contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told.” Timothy Rutten, The Los Angeles Times“Fascinating. . . Indeed, Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness resonates through every page of this book. . . . a haunting story.” The New York Times Book Review“Greg Grandins 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.” The Wall Street Journal“A sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious picture of the automakers attempt to bring the light of American industry to the Amazonian heart of darkness . . . Grandin tells a marvelous tale.” Star Tribune (Minneapolis)“Grandin, a distinguished historian of U.S. misadventures in Latin America, offers a fluently written, fair-minded guide to the Ford Motor Co.s jungle escapades. In addition to his research in company records, he has ransacked the many Ford biographies to assemble a telling portrait of his central character.” Brian Ladd, San Francisco Chronicle“Grandin offers the thoroughly remarkable story of Henry Fords attempt, from the 1920s through 1945, to transform part of Brazils Amazon River basin into a rubber plant