James Scott writes:

It was clear that Henry Ford’s audacious attempt to establish a vast rubber plantation in Amazonia had failed long before the first shipment of latex from Singapore arrived in Brazil in 1951. When the plantation, which was larger than the state of New Jersey, was set up in 1928, the Washington Post’s headline had boasted that it was expected to provide the latex for two million cars a year streaming off the assembly line in Dearborn, Michigan. Not only did it fail to achieve that, it couldn’t even supply Brazil’s modest needs. Why did the richest man in the world fail so abjectly to duplicate his North American successes in Brazil?

The story of Ford’s not-so-excellent adventure in the jungle is a writer’s dream and Greg Grandin takes full advantage of its dramatic potential. Along the Tapajós, a tributary of the Amazon, Ford fought two battles in which the lessons he had learned in Michigan turned out to be handicaps. The first was with the workers of the Brazilian frontier, the second with tropical nature. Ford lost both.

(LRB 8 October 2009)

Metropolitan | 416 pp. |ISBN: 9780805082364