I was very interested by this readable overview, though it did feel a little quick at times. The end of the book spends quite a few pages on just the last couple of years, while at points earlier on you wonder quite why things have been gone through so quickly.

My aim was, of course, to learn more about the country I was born in and have a connection to, but where I didn't go to school apart from one year's primary education. I'm sure there's plenty in this book that I would have learned as a schoolkid, but having said that I would also expect details about the military dictatorship not have been as fully explained as I hoped to see in this text.

What I wasn't expecting was the melodrama and silliness of some of the historical happenings. I knew about the Treaty of Tordesilhas and how it would have allocated Portugal just a wee slice of the continent rather than the huge bulge to the west that it ended up with; the story we learned at school was that the bandeirantes purposefully just kept going and pretended to forget that they should have stopped at the appropriate meridian, and I always found that quite amusing. But I didn't know all these bits:
* The Portuguese court fled Napoleon, lock stock and barrel, displacing their court to Brazil — mad queen, corseted regent, archives and all. But what it ended up as was Dom Pedro I, grandchild of the mad queen, declaring independence against not just his own country, but the country of which he was second in line for the throne! Even more amazingly, his father, just before nipping back to Portugal so that he wouldn't lose his throne, counselled the young Dom Pedro I to choose Brazil if he had to make the choice. Some rebellion! ("No other former colony has ever embraced independence with its own monarch a member of the ruling family of the very country against which it had rebelled", as the book puts it.) Pedro I even ended up going back to Portugal once his dad had copped it, leaving a 5 year old as all-powerful Emperor of Brazil.
* Luckily, Dom Pedro II was a bit of a dude, even going as far as learning the indian language Guaraní. Apparently he did well as a Victorian-era monarch, until he went a bit doo-lally with the war against Paraguay, but ah well.
* But the military eventually got worried that the Emperor was a bit too old and sick, and yikes he only had a daughter to succeed him, and she was married to a bloomin' French guy. No way. So there was a coup. But bloodless, with "Order and Progress" as the new state's motto.
* So much for the new state, which has democracy and elections despite having started with a military coup. Well, until the next military coup - in 1930, which set Getúlio Vargas in place as dictator for the next 15 years or so. He wasn't kicked out by another coup, but rather with quiet pressure that allowed subsequent democratic elections, cool; until WTF? Only 5 years after being kicked out as dictator, Vargas was legally elected as president! Hmm.
* Four years later it all degraded into farce, as political attacks by opponent Carlos Lacerda were met by physical attacks by Vargas' chauffeur bodyguard, who hired an assassin to kill Lacerda. Unfortunately the assassin was pretty rubbish and only managed to shoot him in the foot! The subsequent scandal and other pressures got to Vargas so much that he retired to his bedroom - and shot himself. OK fine, but then he was treated by the Brazilian public as a suicide martyr beloved of the folk. More WTF than I can easily call to mind!
* One last bit of extra WTF-ery before I stop - and that's before we get to nowadays. Jânio Quadros, the president a couple of presidents later - the one after the one who built Brasilia - was a talker, oh yes he was. But he was also a weird dude - "He would spend an inordinately long time obsessively positioning himself exactly in the middle of the rear seat of his limousine, for example." As he got weirder, "political commentators began asking how he planned to govern" but instead, Quadros tackled the obstacles to his stabilization program by abruptly resigning - seemingly assuming his resignation would be rejected and he would be given emergency powers by Congress (like General de Gaulle, apparently). Instead, after less than a year(!), it was: seeya, Quadros baby. And another coup after the next president failed - a vice-president promoted beyond expectations and means.

Less absurdly, I was also very interested in the depiction of the treatment of different races in Brazil, because it differs from what happened in the US and elsewhere. Now, I wouldn't claim Brazil isn't a racist society, because it is - but it's a different sort of racism, that in some ways looks less like what we expect it to. In particular, Brazil historically seems to have had the inverse of the "one drop" racist view in which one drop of black blood means that the bearer is black; rather, it seems to have been the case that there was much more racial mobility in Brazilian society throughout history than in most others. (It's still racist; it's just that if you were the descendant of a white property owner by someone not as white, you could end up being classified as more white than you started off being classified as, if you'd acquired property yourself.)

There also were a lot more free, integrated non-white people making up early Brazilian society than in American society, it seems. Again, not because of non-racist reasons per se - Brazilian slave-owners were very definitely not kind (Darwin was sickened at the treatment laden out by a female Brazilian slave-owner on his stay in the country), but they did free slaves much more than was the case in the US. Why? Because they could buy more, cheap as chips.

Er. So, a lot of factoids and interesting snippets from this book, woven into a coherent narrative that I will nevertheless almost certainly be discarding in favour of "dude! the ex-dictator got re-elected, can you believe it, and then when he shot himself for some reason everyone forgave him and wept in the streets! wtf." Sorry bout that.

The bits from the later years are much less astounding, apart from the years where Brazil had 2000% inflation and stuff, which is differently astounding, or the bit where fucking hell there was a mostly uncorrupt government which actually managed to change things round and make Brazil a country with ordinary inflation instead of hyperinflation. And the bits where the country stood up to international pressures to argue that generic AIDS drugs must be made available at cheaper prices, or got around to electing a working-class president with fractured grammar and a finger chewed up in an industrial accident. Ya know, things that make one proud of a country. A different sort of astounding. ( )