Customer Reviews

A Concise History of Brazil (Cambridge Concise Histories)

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This is the most comprehensive recent history of Brazil by a Brazilian to be translated into English. Its having been written by a Brazilian academic makes it a useful read for those who are also reading books by Americans (Skidmore, Eakin, etc.) But this book founders on Fausto's deep historical understanding and thorough research. There was no factoid too minute or political movement too mundane to leave out. Result: only the most tenacious reader will be able to plod through this leaden work.

Arthur Brakel's translation is mediocre, particularly in the early pages. The prose gets clunky and uses a lot of academic words oddly out of place ("insure" vice "ensure", a situation always "obtains" rather than exists). The maps are a major failure, as the first one is on page 86 and is outdated and inaccurate (failing to show either the country's capital, Brasilia, or states such as Toncatins) yet showing useless details of railway spurs. The next edition needs a dozen strong historical maps, showing the progression from colonial captaincies to modern state. Maps on the conflicts with Uruguay and Paraguay are particularly lacking.

The overabundance of detail about obscure 18th and 19th century political movements merely bogs down the reader. For despite the author's disclaimer in the Preface, this work is really is a chronological narrative only thinly based on underlying themes (such as slavery and regionalism). While Fausto claims to reject "inertia theory" of Brazilian history, the book is really a testament to those ideas. The book is not a complete failure, there are strong and detailed discussions of the coffee economy, a good (though mapless) description of the war with Paraguay, and a particularly insightful discussion of Brazil's long-term, complicated relationship with Great Britain.

The author deliberately made the arbitrary and unhelpful decision to eschew discussion of cultural themes because, he claims, they deserve their own book. Thus readers are deprived of essential material on art, sexuality, family, and sport that are integral to understanding Brazil. These themes are more usefully described in Eakin's book. Sao Paulo's "Modern Art Week", one of the crucial events in Brazil's modern history, is not mentioned even once. The author is excessively Sao Paulo-centric. Most of the text focuses on minor details of Sao Paulo's development to the exclusion of other regions.

While Fausto provides more detail, clarification, and insight than Eakin or Skidmore on many topics, such as the impact of positivism on military thinking, the book gets bogged down in dry recitiation of economic statistics without real analysis and in discussion of minor historical events without real import. It is finally defeated by its dry, uninspired prose, by a parade of chronological details and economic data that make great watershed events and minor political hiccups seem equally (un)important.

This book is concise, but reads like a dictionary definition of Brazilian history. It will have a hard time keeping your attention, even if you are compeletely unfamiliar with Brazilian history.

A much better book is Thomas Skidmore's recent book on the history of Brazil. Or, if you are looking for an understaning of the present state of things in Brazil, I would highly recommend Joseph Page's "The Brazilians."

This is a very interesting book on the History of Brazil. Concise but nevertheless satisfactorily comprehensive.

Brazil is surely a unique occurrence in South America. It was colonized by the Portuguese instead of the Spaniards, it maintained and even expanded its territory while the Spanish South America was fragmented. The ethnical and cultural formation was less influenced by the original inhabitants having received a much more important contribution from Africans. The historical process in Brazil was rather bloodless with little change on the power structure. The few exceptions on Brazil's bloodless history were the violent repressions to popular upheavals that were fiercely opposed before a major national conscience could be formed. Nowadays Brazil presents a strong industry but is still very unfair on the wealth distribution.

The reasons why Brazil became what it is today are brilliantly presented in Boris Fausto book. Each major episode is analyzed on its origins and consequences making the book very well connected. Very useful demographic and economic data is presented throughout the book.

The main problems I see on the book are the lack of simple geographical background information and the writing style that is sometimes very academic and dry. The book presents at least two maps but the use of historic location names without a better explanation can sometimes cause confusion to readers that lack a basic understanding of Brazil's geography. A brief overall introduction to nowadays Brazil regions covering geographical, ethnical, cultural and economic aspects would be welcome in future editions.

Cultural aspects were deliberately ignored. That could make the book concise but it forces the reader to search elsewhere for information on this important aspect in a country's history. A few glitches can be found here and there as it usually happens in translated books, for example magnesium is reported as an important export product during the first 20th century half instead of manganese.

Overall this is a very good book, a great way to have an introduction to the history of such an important and unique country as Brazil.

Fausto makes a difficult choice, limiting his coverage of Brazil's history to things political and economic. Cultural life, he feels, would take another volume. The result is a tale of hard, dramatic realities. We have the booms and busts of various regional resource-economies down the centuries, with the flow of migrants from slumping to temporarily thriving states. The book's mandate requires fairly fine-resolution coverage of political parties, elections, and coups, decade by decade. Both the political alliances and economic problems often seem bewildering, like the mysterious bouts of hyper-stagflation that lost the 1980s.

But Fausto's focus on the eco-political half of Brazil's life can't help but mirror it's cultural and spiritual changes of heart. The colonial-age "bandiera" expeditions of plunder, slave-raiding, and metal-prospecting had their counterparts in the jungle semi-states of escaped slaves. The enormous slave economy involved a high rate of manumission for slaves, often because slave-owners fell in love with slave women. The military coups to thwart communist revolutions confirmed a rise of urban labor movements, massive organization of rural workers, and an often heroic role for church leaders in defending human rights. Fausto crunches the numbers on social change. Among other things, he measures how much the military rulers of 1964 to '89 managed to squeeze the poor majority in terms of education, wages, and taxes -- for the sake of increased investment to richer people.

The story ends before the era of Lula, on a note of optimism with peril. Fausto suspects that a whole raft of old illusions have slowly faded away: "The delusions of grandeur which moved people to violence and to destroy natural resources no longer exist. Brazilians have begun to discard their belief in a providential leader endowed with willpower and magic who will solve their nation's problems."

The book is brand new, clean and crisp, and arrived exactly when it was scheduled to arrive. I would definitely buy from this seller again!

It is the first book I read in Portuguese, hence I lost many things. However, despite that handicap I enjoyed it a lot. It covers about 500 years of history in just around than 300 pages. It gives information, facts and analysis at the same time. It does not focus just on the political side, as many historians do; it also tackles economic issues. In the last chapter the title states from 1964 to 1984; however, it really covers a bit more. I hope the author may present a revised edition to cover the Cardoso's and Lula's periods.

After starting to learn some basic Portuguese I realized that I new next to nothing about the history of Brazil, and thought I should change that. One thing leads to another and I take this book out from the library.

Standard serious academic history here. The text is prosaic, of course, but doesn't seem to me to get dull or into unnecessary and trivial details. The author seems to have a good head on his shoulders, no fantasies or obscure theoreticizing. I find nothing at all awkward or incorrect about the translation either, basically the book reads as if originally written in English. Seems to me that "A Concise History of Brazil" is written as it should be.

Great way to learn about what has happened in Brazil since the Portuguese invaded it in the 1500.