Professor of history at the university of new Orleans, author of 17 books including a new best seller on presidential candidate John Kerry (Tour of Duty) and editor of American History magazine, the indefatigable Douglas Brinkley will speak at the Lee County Reading festival this month about Wheels for the World (Viking, 2003), his book on industrialist extraordinaire and former Fort Myers winter resident Henry Ford. Recently we chatted with Brinkley about the man whom fellow inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison once described as one of "the wild children of nature."

Q: You quote Henry Ford as saying, "I'm going to see that no man gets to know me." Did you?

A: He's certainly enigmatic, complex and paradoxical. He gave us the modern industrial revolution yet wanted to go back to an agrarian lifestyle. He built bird sanctuaries yet polluted the air. He gave African-Americans their greatest break in the industrial world yet was anti-Semitic. Underneath it all there's a stark individualist who had a monomania about the internal combustion engine, and a brilliant tinkerer and engineer who had an extraordinary vision of the next transportation revolution.

Q: How does he compare with his Fort Myers friend and neighbor Thomas Edison?

A: He's a great transforming figure in American life, along with Edison. Nobody influenced Ford more than Edison, who was his mentor and superhero. What he learned from Edison primarily was that failure can lead to success. He never fell into dark despair.

Q: What role did Fort Myers play in Ford's life?

A: Florida became a great reprieve for Henry Ford. He would drive down from Michigan. It was where Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone and he could spend time and talk about what they loved and the world at large. They got to be industrial philosophers in Florida.

Q: Ford had a lazy streak, yet he built a huge corporation. How?

A: He was averse to physical labor, but he did a lot of thinking. It's better to think a lot and come up with one idea than to run around like a maniac and end up spinning your wheels.

Q: What will you talk about here?

A: I'll be talking about Henry Ford as the primary revolutionary in the 20th century, not just in America but in the world. His basic concepts-the moving assembly line, the universality of the automobile, the gospel of efficiency, thinking in global-trade terms, implementing the five-dollar workday, giving birth to the Model T-changed everything. He affected more lives than anyone.

Q: Right up there with railroads and computers?

A: Bigger than either. There wouldn't be an America today without Fordism. An industrial revolution taking place in Detroit under Henry Ford's watchful eye allowed us to manufacture 1,000 planes a day at Willow Run and become the arsenal of democracy. Without it we clearly wouldn't have been able to defeat Hitler and Japan.

Fifth Annual Lee County Reading Festival, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday, March 13, Centennial Park, Fort Myers. Free. Other writers include Rick Bragg, author of I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, and mystery novelist and Gulfshore Life contributor Tim Dorsey. An Evening with the Authors (tickets required) takes place March 12. For more information, call 461-2914.