Well-rounded and -researched portraits of the staggering chasm between rich and poor in Brazil.
On the trail of enormous wealth in Brazil—an engine of national progress or a trench of impoverishment?
As an American journalist for Bloomberg News based in São Paulo from 2010 to 2016, Cuadros became both fascinated and appalled by the excessive wealth he witnessed. While the Brazilian nouveau rich used to ape the styles of the French, now it is the United States via Miami, where much of the Latin American wealth is invested. In this “parallel universe” of billionaires, the author became acquainted with the “ladder of luxuries” such as private jets, rarefied art and cars, pricey real estate, and restaurants. In this universe, the names on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index needed to worry constantly about kidnapping and protection of family members. The two tried-and-true ways of getting rich in the Brazilian economy were by politics and/or public contracts, and while many of the billionaires Cuadros covers were mired in graft and corruption scandals, the Brazilian saying “Rouba mas faz” (he steals but he gets things done) sums up the public tolerance for them. Cuadros dutifully reveals many of the major players: Paulo Maluf, the force behind the building of the so-called Minhocão (Big Worm) freeway, has become a kind of poster boy for patronage; soy baron and former Mato Grosso Gov. Blairo Maggi routinely battled environmentalists over issues of deforestation; Roberto Marinho built the dominant Rede Globo TV network; Edir Macedo fashioned a massive Universal Church of the Kingdom of God from relentless tithing of the faithful; Eike Batista, head of OGX Petroleo e Gas, went from being the richest man in Brazil to bankrupt. The debt that many of these men owe to the acquiescence of the government, namely that of former populist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, is remarkable—e.g., what has come to light over the skimming of profits from the massive Belo Monte Dam.
Well-rounded and -researched portraits of the staggering chasm between rich and poor in Brazil.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9676-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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