Brazil: A Biography

It is good news for anyone in the Anglophone world interested in Brazil that there is now a single volume in English, by two of Brazil's most eminent historians, that surveys that nation's history from its colonial roots to the very recent past. There are other histories of Brazil available to the interested reader, but they tend to be volumes written specifically with the undergraduate classroom in mind. Brazil: A Biography is not that sort of book; for one thing, there are few undergraduate courses—outside Brazil—in which the students are likely to be amenable to reading a history of Brazil that clocks in at over 600 pages (not counting endnotes) and that often goes into exhaustive detail about relatively obscure political episodes. No, the ideal reader for the book under review is not the fledgling history major but more likely a graduate student in Latin American history or a historian...