There's a second edition of this work with different editors that I realize now may have been better to read insofar as it would have included another twenty years of writing—that is, it would have included the Internet age, which was barely getting started when this first edition came out and plays no role in this volume. I chose the first edition, however, because it seemed organized in a manner more in keeping with what I was looking for. The first five parts are mostly readings that follow the historical development of Brazil, and the last four parts focus on cultural subjects—namely, women, race, economics, and popular culture (mostly music). The other subjects, of course, come up in the first five sections, but there's a nice balance here in terms of giving a reader a very general sense of the Brazilian experience.
I had read chapters about Brazil's history in books about Latin American history, so I didn't think that a book just recounting the history of the country was going to be as helpful to me as a book that would more fully also explore the country's culture. This book was a nice balance. Each of the parts comes with a short introduction, so essentially one stepped through history while reading the book. But then that history was backed up by primary documents from the period in question and sometimes further historical articles on a specific aspect of the period involved.
The first part revolved around Indian life and the explorers. Included among the readings was a creation myth that was more easily approached than many Native American stories in that regard. There were also Western accounts of Indian culture. The second part dealt with the colonial period and the familiar story of how Portugal's monarch actually came to be in Brazil for a while and liked it so much he didn't want to return to Portugal but was forced to do so. Part 3 dealt with slavery and its aftermath. Part 4 dealt with the Vargas period, when Getulio Vargas essentially ruled as a dictator after having come to power in an election. And then part 5 dealt with the military dictatorship that followed and finally the reestablishment of democracy, which at the time this book came out had only been active for about a decade. It was trippy seeing the names of some politicians who are still active in Brazil in that last historical section and to think the Brazilian democracy has managed to survive a couple of decades more.
Along the way one learns about how the arts didn't seem heavily impacted by the dictatorship, which seemed focused more on practical things. As such, subtle critiques of the regime often snuck by in music and literature, before being banned. One learns about racial dynamics in Brazil, which of course mythically are said to be nonissues but really are just like so many other areas of the world: the lighter your skin, the more advantages you have. There's a little about sport, a lot about music, making me wish that I'd more often had access to the Internet while reading so that I could play some of the styles of these songs to know what the authors were writing about.
Overall, one gets the sense of a country that is, unfortunately, like so much of the third world, a study in contrasts: a small very rich class and a large very poor one. There was one essay about a movie from the 1970s that focused on children growing up in the latter milieu and what became of them (though as stars of the film their lives had opportunity to go farther than most others, at least for the star of the film, things ended up badly); the film itself sounded a lot like the 2000s film Children of God but a whole lot more bleak: gangs and crime aplenty, with little way out.
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