Review: Brazil: Five Centuries of Change
July 17, 2012
Brazil: Five Centuries of Change by Thomas E. Skidmore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I picked up this book one week before visiting the country to get a bit of background on a then completely unknown part of the World. The book does a decent job at that. Starting with the Portuguese gives a long term perspective that I certainly enjoyed and gives the author the chance to dig into the the deep reasons of some of the main characteristics of today's Brazil. The main drawback I found is that, although the book's not very dry, it has been written by a hardcore historian, not a journalist or traveler. Expect to get all the dates, names and events, but maybe not a good human reconstruction of what it was like to live in the Brazil of the past.