Shortlisted for the Jabuti Prize for the Best Brazilian Book Published Abroad, this sweeping biography of Brazil is, as Dominic Sandbrook wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘Engrossing … eye-opening … an enormously refreshing treat’. When Europeans arrived on Brazil’s shores in 1500, they encountered a land of breathtaking beauty and staggering scale — larger than the contiguous United States and, in some regions, still not fully mapped today. Yet alongside its grandeur came scenes of terrible ferocity: the near-extermination of its native peoples, the revolutionary challenge those peoples posed to European self-understanding, and the brutal reality of imported slavery that made the country a hell on earth for countless Africans even as it offered white settlers seemingly boundless opportunity.
Written by two of Brazil’s foremost historians and a bestseller in Brazil itself, Brazil: A Biography sets out to capture the overwhelming diversity and contradictions of this vast nation across five centuries. At the heart of the book lies the near-continuous struggle to build political institutions and social frameworks capable of delivering stable growth, the rule of law, and genuine protection for all citizens. Brazil’s repeated failure to sustain these achievements has been a source of recurring tragedy. Yet even now, in the twenty-first century, the country endures as one of the world’s great experiments — creative, harsh, and singular — as compelling a story for those who live within it as for those watching from outside.
ISBN 13: 9780141976198
Author: Heloisa Maria Murgel Starling
