‘An irresistible parable, both tragic and comic’
Posted on 2010/12/03 , tagged as
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Fordlandia is one of Ferdinand Mount’s Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement.
‘Henry Ford’s vast project of building a city in the Amazonian jungle to provide his car factories with a reliable supply of rubber was greeted as a heroic civilizing mission when it started and damned as catastrophic Western hubris when it failed. The saga remains an irresistible parable, both tragic and comic. I cannot stop thinking of Ford’s homesick managers staring glumly at the vultures overhead and dreaming of the pigeons back in Detroit. Greg Grandin’s wonderful Fordlandia (Icon) is alive to every nuance of the story but is sparing with the condescension of posterity, reminding us that Brazil’s own loggers and soy farmers are ploughing the same cruel furrows today. ‘
