With the recent granting of the 2016 Summer Olympics to Rio de Janeiro, Rohter’s accomplished overview proves a solid...
A timely, readable study of Brazil’s history and current prospects.
Having traveled and lived in the country since the early ’70s, New York Times culture reporter Rohter has found that Brazil’s motto of “Order and Progress”—once denigrated as “Disorder and Backwardness”—has finally come to fruition. From a country where 80 percent of the population once lived in the countryside, the other 20 in the cities, the percentages are now reversed, and Brazil’s current 200 million inhabitants make up the fifth most populous country in the world. The country also has a land area greater than the continental United States. Self-sufficient in oil and gas, the world’s foremost manufacturer of ethanol, thanks to the country’s forward-thinking use of the abundantly renewable sugarcane, and with the staggering natural resources of the Amazon at its disposal—to disastrous ecological results—Brazil is indeed a global force to be reckoned with. From the succession of military dictatorships of the late ’60s to the ’70s, accompanied by the so-called economic Brazilian Miracle of the early ’70s, to the slide into the comfortable democracy of charismatic leaders Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—the latter has been the presiding president since 2002—the country has achieved political stability and huge economic growth during the last 15 years. Rohter looks at the rich makeup of the country, starting with a (too) cursory history of the Portuguese arrival in 1500, who displaced but did not annihilate the indigenous tribes; the curse of the importation of African slaves (slavery wasn’t abolished until the 1880s); and the racial mixing that came to define Brazilian culture—curiously, the “white elite” endorsed the “whitening” of the black population for the purposes of superior “ethnic composition” well up to 1945. The author also offers an evenhanded consideration of some of Brazil’s most celebrated artifacts, including Carnaval, soccer and samba. Overall, he depicts a tolerant people intent on being taken seriously.
With the recent granting of the 2016 Summer Olympics to Rio de Janeiro, Rohter’s accomplished overview proves a solid brush-up.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-61887-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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