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Leading English-language account of the fall of Lula’s Workers’ Party and rise of Bolsonaro and the New Right What does Brazil’s lurch to the hard right under Jair Bolsonaro portend for Latin America’s largest country, and how has it come about? Always something of a world unto itself, Brazil became, under the Workers’ Party from 2003 to 2016, “the theatre of a socio-political drama without equivalent in any other major state.” Bucking the global trend towards a tighter neoliberalism, former steelworker Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva swept aside the broken promises of previous years to invest in social transfers, defying vituperations in the Brazilian media to become the most popular ruler of the age. But in a second spectacular reversal, a parliamentary coup d’état against Lula’s successor—backed by forces in the judiciary and a youthful New Right—has been consolidated by Bolsonaro’s 2018 capture of the Planalto. With the PT’s lodestar now behind bars, a weighing up of his legacy, and of the contrasting Bolsonaro regime, is urgently needed. Brazil Apart is the sharp-edged, comprehensive analytic account required.
“Rohter’s crisp biography is a welcome addition to the new, more inclusive canon.” —Rachel Slade, New York Times Book Review A thrilling biography of the Indigenous Brazilian explorer, scientist, stateseman, and conservationist who guided Theodore Roosevelt on his journey down the River of Doubt. Cândido Rondon is by any measure the greatest tropical explorer in history. Between 1890 and 1930, he navigated scores of previously unmapped rivers, traversed untrodden mountain ranges, and hacked his way through jungles so inhospitable that even native peoples had avoided them—and led Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, on their celebrated “River of Doubt” journey in 1913–14. ...
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS A riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture, this immigrant family memoir recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller. In Nuestra América, eminent anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz traces his grandparents’ exile from Eastern Europe to South America. At the same time, the book is a pretext to explain and analyze the worldview, culture, and spirit of countries such as Peru, Colombia, and Chile, from the perspective of educated Jewish emigrants imbued with the hope and determination typical of those who escaped Europe in the 1920s. Lomnitz’s grandparent...
In this hugely praised narrative, New York Times reporter Larry Rohter takes the reader on a lively trip through Brazil's history, culture, and booming economy. Going beyond the popular stereotypes of samba, supermodels, and soccer, he shows us a stunning and varied landscape--from breathtaking tropical beaches to the lush and dangerous Amazon rainforest--and how a complex and vibrant people defy definition. He charts Brazil's amazing jump from a debtor nation to one of the world's fastest growing economies, unravels the myth of Brazil's sexually charged culture, and portrays in vivid color the underbelly of impoverished favelas. With Brazil leading the charge of the Latin American decade, this critically acclaimed history is the authoritative guide to understanding its meteoric rise.
'Breaking Bad meets City of God' Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah HUSBAND. This is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel and Brazil’s most notorious criminal. FATHER. A man who tried to bring welfare and justice to a playground of gang culture and destitution, while everyone around him drew guns and partied. DRUG LORD. It’s a story of gold-hunters and evangelical pastors, bent police and rich-kid addicts, politicians and drug lords and the battle for the beautiful but damned city of Rio. MOST WANTED CRIMINAL.
Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are...
'Glorious' New York Times 'Endlessly inventive', Guardian, Best Books of 2016 'Wildly funny' Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies As Caravaggio, the libertine of Italy’s art world, and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo aim to settle scores over the course of one brutal tennis match, the old European order edges closer to eruption. Across the ocean, in early sixteenth-century Mexico, the Aztec Empire is under the fatal grip of Hernán Cortés and his Mayan lover. While they scheme and conquer, fight and fuck, their domestic comedy will change the course of history, throwing the world – and Rome’s tennis match – into a mind-bending reverie of assassinations, executions, papal dramas, carnal liaisons and artistic revolution. Translated by Natasha Wimmer, the prize-winning translator of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and 2666.
The fortunes of the late nineteenth century’s imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material—rubber—with only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for the Amazon—a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest’s riches. In the midst of this struggle, Euclides da Cunha, engineer, journalist, geographer, political theorist, and one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, led a survey expedition to the farthest reaches of the river, among the world’s most valuable, dangerous, and little-known landscapes. The Scramble for the Ama...
Far from the glittering cities of Beijing and Shanghai, China's borderlands are populated by around one hundred million people who are not Han Chinese. For many of these restive minorities, the old Chinese adage 'the mountains are high and the Emperor far away', meaning Beijing's grip on power is tenuous and its influence unwelcome, continues to resonate. Travelling through China's most distant and unknown reaches, David Eimer explores the increasingly tense relationship between the Han Chinese and the ethnic minorities. Deconstructing the myths represented by Beijing, Eimer reveals a shocking and fascinating picture of a China that is more of an empire than a country.
The 1990s have witnessed several major external initiatives to reshape the domestic political arrangements of countries. Because these have been collective foreign ventures, usually with the active collaboration of the target countries, the term intervention is ill-suited. Instead, Deon Geldenhuys introduces the notion of foreign political engagement to describe international attempts at remaking countries in the image of the West. South Africa, Kenya, Somalia, Russia, Cambodia, El Salvador and Haiti serve as case-studies to demonstrate this important theoretical rethinking of international relations today.