Brazil: A Biography

Engrossing ... eye-opening ... an enormously refreshing treat -- Dominic Sandbrook * Sunday Times *
With great skill the authors have managed to combine clarity and consistency, substance and fluency, historical precision and a text that is a joy to read * Lira Neto *
A thoughtful and profound journey into the soul of Brazil...The Brazil that emerges from this book is, indeed, a fascinating, complex, multicoloured, contradictory and challenging organism, more like a living being than a political, cultural and geographical entity -- Laurentino Gomes * Folha de São Paulo *
Coinciding with the election of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, this epic history of the world's sixth most populous country is a shocking, dramatic and utterly engrossing read. The details of Brazil's history, from the 19th-century empire to the suicide of the quasi-fascist dictator Getulio Vargas, are largely unknown to British readers, but that only makes its dark story all the more fascinating. * The Sunday Times, Books of the Year *
Detailed and deeply reasoned . . . Illuminating, engrossing, and consistently thoughtful. -- Larry Rohter * The New York Review of Books *
Compelling and insightful . . . One of Schwarcz and Starling's great strengths is their dissection of changing racial identity. -- Geoff Dyer * Financial Times *
Evocative . . . Schwarcz and Starling adopt what they call a biographical approach: an attempt to tell the collective stories of the generations of Brazilians that have lived . . . They achieve this with flair in their rich evocations of colonial and imperial Brazil . . . Rich and absorbing. -- Patrick Wilcken * The Times Literary Supplement *