WonkyTonk returns with a look at Ford’s forgotten jungle city

LIVINGSTON MANOR, NY — Hamish & Henry Booksellers’ WonkyTonk book club will return starting on Friday, January 29 at 6:30 p.m. with a discussion of Greg Grandin’s “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City.”

Grandin, an NYU professor of Latin American history, offers the story of Henry Ford’s attempt, from the 1920s through 1945, to transform part of Brazil’s Amazon River basin into a rubber plantation and eponymous American-style company town: Fordlandia. Grandin has found a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictory parts of Henry Ford: the pacifist, the internationalist, the virulent anti-Semite, the $5-a-day friend of the workingman, the anti-union crusader, the man who ushered America into the industrial age yet rejected the social changes that followed urbanization.

For more information visit hamishandhenry.com/blog/?page_id=7.