Brazil: a biography

Written by two leading historians, Brazil: A Biography is a sweeping and absorbing portrait of Brazil from its origins to the twenty-first century. 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. Brazile received more than 40 percent of the African population that was stolen from the continent, and was the last country in the Western world to abolish the slave system. Brazil is larger than the contiguous United States and occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans more than five hundred years, from the Amerindian civilization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil offers a rich and 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, literature, 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, postcolonial political dysfunction, and inequality persist to this day. Even now, Brazil stands as one of the world's great experiements - creative, harsh, unique, and as compelling a story for outsiders as for its inhabitants. -- From dust jacket.

Translated from Portuguese.

Originally published as : Brasil: uma biografia. Brazil : Companhia das Letras, 2015.