Review by Choice Review
The authors set out to write not a general history, but a "biography"--which oddly ascribes a kind of personhood to the nation. While the first half of the book is richly layered, its treatment of 20th-century history barely scratches the surface of traditional accounts. Brazil's precolonial societies are eloquently described. The stubborn misconception that the demise of Indians prompted the importation of African slaves is accurately contested by a description of the persistence of indigenous slavery, which continued well into the 18th century. The rendering of the African slave trade and sugar industry synthesizes a rich historiography, beginning with the description of the earliest slaves from Angola and Guinea. The authors narrate the rise of skin color as an indelible indicator of social status, a characteristic of Brazilian society to this day. Fugitive communities (quilombos) are chronicled as the principle expression of resistance alongside syncretic religious traditions. The book is replete with detailed analyses of recurrent political uprisings, from the Minas Conspiracy of 1789 to the 1835 Muslim slave revolt in Salvador. Overall, the book settles for a very conventional political chronology, ending with a positive assessment of the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and a brief journalistic afterword on the era of Workers' Party governance. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; public libraries. --Geoffroy de Laforcade, Norfolk State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Written by two leading Brazilian historians and translated from Portuguese, this is a critical "biography" of the country of Brazil. Schwarcz and Starling argue that Brazil was forged with violence, which pervades its history and challenges its self-image as a just society as it has a long tradition of racial and cultural intermingling. The authors call out widespread "Bovarism" (a notion inspired by Frenchman Gustave Flaubert's eponymous Madame Bovary), from which Brazilians experience chronic dissatisfaction and a sense of lacking agency. After this provocative start, the narrative becomes a conventional history complete with dates, names, events, crises, and social movements. Coverage runs from 16th century European colonization through Brazil's return to democracy in the 1990s. Along this journey, readers will encounter many objects of fascination. Quilombos were free cities established by slaves who broke their chains. Brazil and its allies decimated Paraguay in the ghastly War of the Triple Alliance. Fascist sympathizer and strongman Getúlio Vargas committed suicide rather than lose power. Seminal treatises such as Gilberto Freyre's Casa-Grande & Senzala and Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago transformed 20th century Brazilian intellectual life. VERDICT Specialists and Lusophiles will enjoy this history's depth and rigor, though its prosy 800 pages may faze casual readers.-Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 So 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
