"Perlman returned repeatedly to the famed slums of Rio de Janeiro to follow four generations of residents over 40 years. She writes with compassion, artistry, and intelligence, using stirring personal stories to illustrate larger points substantiated with statistical analysis." --Foreign Affairs
"With a scope that betrays her passion for her subjects, Perlman easily oscillates between narrative and statistical analyses, reporting on touching personal events as well as on larger issues of violence, marginality, and globalization. Perlman is as curious as she is thorough, providing exhaustive research and succeeding in supplying a cohesive and often awing account of the complexities and humanity in Rio's favelas." --
The Global Journal "A valuable and vivid study of life as it has been lived by the poor in one of Latin America's biggest cities." --
Times Literary Supplement "Janice Perlman is one of the leading researchers on urban marginality, and
Favela is an exceptional analysis of the evolution of several originally informal settlement over four decades. I highly recommend it as reading for students, urban practitioners, and policy makers." --Manuel Castells, author of
The Information Age "Janice Perlman has written a moving account of her experience over four decades studying, living and working in three of Rio's favelas. This work will appeal to academics--it is full of fine analytical work, as well as to the reader who is concerned with understanding poverty and social justice and how millions in Brazil are trapped by their environment, lack of education and now by crime and violence. While the location of this work is Rio, the lessons and challenges of poverty in big cities is of importance to us all, as the world moves to 2050 when 75% of the population will be in urban areas." --James D. Wolfensohn, Former President, The World Bank
"Perlman has produced an excellent, exhaustive study of life in the 1,020 favelas- squatter settlements in Rio de Janeiro..." --
Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"Enlightening and exceptional." --
Library Journal "Perlman seeks to recover stories of people and families with whom she had contact in the late 1960s. As such, her work offers a great contribution, since she incorporates a longitudinal analysis over a long time span... Perlman's narrative is pure delicacy and poetry when she portrays slums as places where friendship, affection, and popular culture prevail." --
Contemporary Sociology
