Brazil: A Biography

by Lilia M. Schwarcz, Heloisa M. Starling Narrated by Sarah Mollo-Christensen

Overview

For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown.

In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil offers a rich, dramatic history of this complex country. The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation but follow the shifting byways of food, art, and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles.

Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history, anthropology, political science, and economics, Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social, political, and economic progress and struggle, a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races and postcolonial political dysfunction persists to this day.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

The Times (UK) Best Books of 2018 • Financial Times Best Books of 2018

“Detailed and deeply reasoned . . . Illuminating, engrossing, and consistently thoughtful.” —Larry Rohter, The New York Review of Books

"Evocative . . . Schwarcz and Starling adopt what they call a biographical approach: an attempt to tell the collective stories of the generations of Brazilians that have lived . . . They achieve this with flair in their rich evocations of colonial and imperial Brazil . . . Rich and absorbing." —Patrick Wilcken, The Times Literary Supplement

"Compelling and insightful . . . One of Schwarcz and Starling’s great strengths is their dissection of changing racial identity." —Geoff Dyer, Financial Times

“A thoughtful and profound journey into the soul of Brazil . . . The Brazil that emerges from this book is, indeed, a fascinating, complex, multicolored, contradictory and challenging organism, more like a living being than a political, cultural and geographical entity.” —Laurentino Gomes, Folha de São Paulo

“We have been in need of a comprehensive history of Brazil, sensitive and grounded in rigorous research, for some time now; a work that would recognize the advancements of the last five centuries but would also deal frankly with the many obstacles inherent in the building of complete social, political, and racial citizenship. Therefore, this extraordinary tour de force by two of the greatest Brazilian historians in actuality is a very pertinent work.” —Kenneth Maxwell, founder of the Brazil Studies Program at Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

“This book is an unauthorized biography of a complex character named Brazil. It skillfully combines various facets of this character that has been formed and transformed through more than five centuries and is still developing as far as the eye can see.” —Boris Fausto, author of A Concise History of Brazil

“We are dealing with an unauthorized biography of Brazil, free of rigid methods of interpretation, of officialisms, and of the concern for praise or condemnation. It is a new interpretive narrative, challenging, and molded in transparent language alien to the usual academic jargon. The reader will recognize his country, complete with its lights and shadows, and will feel encouraged to participate in the adventure that is its construction.” —José Murilo de Carvalho, author of The Formation of Souls: Imagery of the Republic in Brazil

Kirkus Reviews

2018-06-27
A sprawling "biography" of a vast country that has always been much different from any of its neighbors in South America."If you steal a little you're a thief," goes a Brazilian proverb, "if you steal a lot you're a chief." A colonial power, Brazil was a source of immense wealth for its colonizer, Portugal, for generations, even if the colonizing class soon found that the parent nation's "finances had been seriously affected by the high cost of running the empire." It was always a kind of business proposition. As Brazilian historians Schwarcz (Anthropology/Univ. of São Paulo; The Emperor's Beard: Dom Pedro II and His Tropical Monarchy in Brazil, 2004, etc.) and Starling write, although African slavery had existed for a long time before Portuguese ships appeared, when they did arrive, it was with an innovation: that slaves would be put to work in agriculture and not, as before, in artisanal enterprises. When Brazil became independent, it enshrined its own ruling class, with voting rights extended to only a small class of landowners; it was the last on the continent to abolish the slavery that had made its rich agriculture possible. Some of the aspects of the Brazilian approach to life, write the authors, seem constant and remain "shockingly resistant to improvement," especially the violent undercurrent that has always run through the nation's history. Another less pronounced current is regionalism; in the early 19th century, for instance, some of the southern provinces of the nation tried to break away, leading to a civil war. Yet, the authors add, history is not necessarily destiny. In their youth, a time of junta and military dictatorship, the thought that a leftist like Lula or Dilma Rousseff could become president would have been unthinkable, and although "extreme social injustice still exists alongside democracy," the country is making strides in containing corruption and smoothing out some of the rougher edges of inequality.A welcome, readable history of a country that ranks high among the world's economic powers but is too little known beyond its own borders.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171188719
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	01/17/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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