Brazil

Brazil has long been an enigma to outsiders. Over the last two decades alone, Latin America’s largest and most populous country has been celebrated as a vibrant new democracy with a powerful economy, and derided as a nation in complete disarray heading toward the status of a failed state.

In this vibrant and smart book, Joel Wolfe tells the story of this “incomplete nation” and its two-hundred-year-old struggle to control its vast national territory and to fashion and maintain a functionin...