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There’s five-eighths of a good book here, but it desperately needed editing and reorganization that it didn’t get. The French police seizing a building is told as a new fact in three sequential chapters.

But the worst of it is the glib treatment of the Holocaust. Con Choltitz’s active participation is mentioned, but he’s still written as a hero. The murder of 97% of foreign Jews in Paris is qualified with a “Bad as that may seem”. You do not, in fact, have to hand it to them.

Necessarily, this book doesn’t get too deep into any one episode of history. It effectively frames mostly well-known episodes as part of a unified experience of the hemisphere instead of a “global south”/“global north” framing.

There are some strange rhetorical choices which detract from the experience. The author goes to great lengths to make sure no reader could think he approves of US culture. While minor, having all but one reference to the Falkland Islands instead written as “Malvinas” is an obnoxious, imperialist choice, especially without any discussion of the Argentine aggression of 1982.

The books discussion of the future is as relevant as you could expect a book about international relations finished just before 9/11 to be: not remotely, but one can’t blame the author for that.

To give full context for the story, this is partially a biography of Henry Ford and a history of the Amazon. The pacing and weaving together of storylines is excellent, and paints a vivid picture of the hubris and hopes of the project.

The epilogue could be done without. The author seems to feel he needs to close with a condemnation of “capitalism” as a whole, casting the Fordlandia folly as a specific consequence of capitalism. Keeping in mind the Soviet Union’s destruction of the Aral Sea, this rings hollow and ends an otherwise excellent book on environmental destruction, colonialism, and yes, self-impressed capitalism, on an unconvincing screed.