Search results for ""Author Robert M. Levine""

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Bordering all but two of South America’s other nations and by far Latin America’s largest country, Brazil differs linguistically, historically, and culturally from Spanish America. Its indigenous peoples share the country with descendants of Portuguese conquerors and the Africans they imported to work as slaves, along with more recent immigrants from southern Europe, Japan, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Capturing the scope of this country’s rich diversity and distinction as no other book has done—with more than a hundred entries from a wealth of perspectives—The Brazil Reader offers a fascinating guide to Brazilian life, culture, and history. Complementing traditional views with fresh ones, The Brazil Reader’s historical selections range from early colonization to the present day, with sections on imperial and republican Brazil, the days of slavery, the Vargas years, and the more recent return to democracy. They include letters, photographs, interviews, legal documents, visual art, music, poetry, fiction, reminiscences, and scholarly analyses. They also include observations by ordinary residents, both urban and rural, as well as foreign visitors and experts on Brazil. Probing beneath the surface of Brazilian reality—past and present—The Reader looks at social behavior, women’s lives, architecture, literature, sexuality, popular culture, and strategies for coping with the travails of life in a country where the affluent live in walled compounds to separate themselves from the millions of Brazilians hard-pressed to find food and shelter. Contributing to a full geographic account—from the Amazon to the Northeast and the Central-South—of this country’s singular multiplicity, many pieces have been written expressly for this volume or were translated for it, having never previously been published in English. This second book in The Latin America Readers series will interest students, specialists, travelers for both business and leisure, and those desiring an in-depth introduction to Brazilian life and culture.

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In August 1960 the publication of Quarto de Despejo (Child of the Dark) created a sensation in Brazil—and in the rest of the world—as it appeared in translations in fourteen languages. That diary of a poor black woman from a favela on the outskirts of São Paulo became the best-selling book in Brazilian history. In it, Carolina Maria de Jesus chronicled her life as an unemployed, single parent of three children, eking out a precarious existence selling scrap paper and other detritus found in the city streets. She described how she wrote at night on the scavenged scraps. Her remarkable diary—angry, proud, wretched, and hopeful—was found and published by an enterprising journalist. The book’s success permitted Carolina to leave her flimsy shack in triumph and move into the cinder-block house of her fantasy. I’m Going to Have a Little House is de Jesus’s second diary. It covers the first year following her rise to fame. In it she recounts her struggles with celebrity, middle-class expectations, and the racial and social tensions her success had exacerbated. This work, never previously translated into English, tells the rest of the story—the grim truth that favela life doesn’t prepare one for middle-class "respectability" and that the fall back into poverty is as easy as the struggle to escape it is difficult. Carolina Maria de Jesus died in 1977, forgotten and in poverty.

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