Interesting and of great use to all those concerned both about poverty and the decline of urban life

Donaldo's surname is of Spanish origin and is spelled Macedo. Not Scottish - as in Mac Edo!!!!!

After posting my review of Geld's book, I read the review written by an unnamed person in the Publishers Weekly. This reviewer read a different book from the one I did, or worse chose only to skim it, with the thought of writing from their own biased understanding of Brazil. I would be willing to wager that this reviewer has never set foot on a farm nor taken the time to understand a country as big and diverse as the U. S.

The reviewer obviously wanted Geld to delve into the ecological problems of developing in the Amazon River basin and discards completely Gelds questioning of the long term issues related to development in the Amazon River basin. Geld very interestingly compared development in Parana, which she witnessed when she first arrived in Brazil, with what she saw occurring in the Amazon.

The political realities of agrarian reform are also lost on the reviewer. Several times in the book Geld explained how politicians in their attempt to improve conditions for small farmers, often complicate and hinder proper development of land. Geld's description of the small farmer who couldn't get title to his land, because the government was concerned that title would allow him to sell his land, but resulted in him not being able to borrow money to properly improve the land was but one example of her understanding and admirable description of these complex issues. Geld's quote of her father, "Poor people make poor soil," is very appropriate.

Your comment, "...parallels between the rich Ohio agrarian society of her youth and the subtropical poverty of a Brazilian farm economy", is laughable. I have visited Louis Bromfield's Malabar Farms twice in the past ten years and can tell you that the surrounding farms are anything but rich. Due to the diligence and innovative farming practices of her father, he slowly turned a run-down Depression era farm into a marvelous, model, working farm. Brazil's agricultural economy is far from poverty, as the country is rapidly overtaking the U. S. in farm production and productivity. This unnamed reviewers comments reflect either ignorance or some other hidden political agenda...

Ellen Bromfield Geld's new book View From the Fazenda is a delightful chronicle of her life as an immigrant to Brazil in 1961 up through today. She and her entrepreneurial husband Carson moved to Brazil as bright newlyweds, but without many material things other than the clothes on their backs. After several jobs on ranches, they accumulated enough funds to buy a small farm of 240 acres. Unlike most typical Brazilian farmers who lived in town, the Gelds quickly built a small house, making it the focal point for the recreation from a monoculture coffee farm into a diversified model. Showing a true love of the land Geld, writes of the many conservation innovations they bring to the farm with terracing, crop rotations and other ecologically friendly improvements.

Her travels throughout Brazil are interesting and well told. The best are her experiences in the fragile Amazon in Alta Floresta; Riding the riverboat on the River Sao Francisco; and the beauty of the relatively unknown Plantanal. She vividly describes the wonders she encounters in these sparsely populated, wild west areas of Brazil. While explaining these new areas, she also expresses her uneasiness and concern with how development is occurring in many of these areas relating them to the older areas of Parana that she saw develop when she first arrived in Brazil.

Several of her stories in the book are particularly humorous. Two of the better ones are how she has to show a group of Brazilian tourists that an American motel is not paid for by the hour and her experience of riding the Brazilian equivalent to the Orient Express.

Her forty year experience of adapting to a new country, raising a family of five children (all of whom study abroad but return to Brazil), and seeing the changes that occur over forty years is extremely interesting. It brought to mind what my ancestors might have faced when they came to the U. S. several generations ago to begin a new life as farmers in a very strange land.

I started the book over a weekend and couldn't put it down. It is highly recommended.

Barbara Weinstein's study of the Sao Paulo, Brazil working class covers much more than labor relations in that city. As US and European social scientists and labor historians seek to broaden their understanding of labor/management relations in other parts of the world, they will find this an invaluable source. Extremely well-documented, with evidence from oral histories, interviews, newspapers, government documents and secondary sources, Weinstein tells the story of a ruling elite that tried to tame its workers in novel ways. In everything from cooking classes for women to soccer and volleyball games for male and female workers, the Sao Paulo manufacturers tried to lure their workers away from the anarchist meeting hall, or even the local bar, and into increasing productivity (and profits) for the company. They succeeded in some ways, but mainly failed. Sao Paulo's workers are some of the most militant in the world today. This is a fascinating story that should be! told in every labor, urban or social history class.

Finally a book that goes beyond, the fact that Brazil is not a racial democracy, and examines how the Afro-Brazilian has fought aganist racism. Dr. Butler shows the various ways that Afro-Brazilians have fought and reacted aganist racism. However, what makes this study so important is the primary research that she used,particularly in the case of Salvador,Bahia;very little has been known about how Afro-Brazilians have reacted to racism in the north-east. This is probably the most important book in the field of Afro-Brazilian studies-a must buy for all those who are interested in the Afro-diaspora in the Americas,and how Black folk have reacted to racism after slavery.

Many readers know Carolina de Jesus's memior "Child of the Dark" but few knew that she wrote a second book about her bitter journey from her favela shack to the brick house of her dreams. There, she was treated just as badly as she had been when she was a scavenger for garbage in the favela. As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Brazil (too many years ago!!) I loved this book. It is riveting, unexpected, and filled with insights about how Carolina de Jesus saw the world. The editor's background description and analysis is excellent, too.

This is a marvelous study not only of a poignant African-Brazilian woman persecuted for daring to state her beliefs, but one that reveals the different ways that American (Levine) and Brazilian (Meihy) scholars perceive the problems of race in society. A must read for anyone interested in Latin American society or the history of women or of blacks in the hemisphere.

When I read this book, I could not belive its effect on me. I went back to London(in my imagination)due to the gorgeous description of the places,life and feelings an immigrant can experience far away from home. The author seems to have a special talent to make you feel the situations he had been through, happiness, sadness, sex etc., but the most important thing is the fact that the story is entirely based on real life. I highly recommend this book to those who would like to risk their comfortable life at home, going without serious bases to try to find new horizons abroad, especially in these days that we are living in a world crowded of people.

Phillip Berryman's book insightfully captures the religious goings on of Sao Paolo and Caracas. This book goes a long way towards explaining the interaction between the traditional Catholic ways of religion, the mainline Protestants and the relatively new Pentacostal movements.

Furthermore, Berryman's study serves as a model for the way in which these interactions have taken place in other areas of the world, such as the US, where there are far along, Africa, where they are just beginning and Asia which is somewhere in between.

I would have been interested in more history of these developments, especially how the movements emmigrated from the US, then again, I'm probably one of those overly US centered Americans. :)

Dean's work is an historical geography of a coffee growing region in São Paulo state. Issues of land ownership, including squatters' rights, the granting of sesmarias, and land speculation are of interest in this text. Dean also examines the frontier's allure in that social distinctions seem to disappear on the frontier. The reason Dean gives for the lack of social distinctions and privileges is that land ownership determines one's social status.

The English release of the 1985 findings by the Brazilian Catholic Church is among the most gut wrenching books I have read on any such subject in the last few years. While it is commonplace amongst scholars of Latin American or so called "Third World" nations to learn or read about such obvious atrocities, it never gets any less easy to digest or to fully comprehend such acts without asking the age old questions- How? and Why?

The study was an immense undertaking for the Church, and the findings are painstaking in their details- discussing rigged trials in order to quickly kill off "ememies," to the day to day horrors and brutality that everday people endured in the name of state "security," to the AI5, a political police action designed to crush the political and intellectual MPB (Musica Popularia Brasilia) of the late 1960's, which included the so-called "Tropicalia" movement (which included musicians such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil- both of whom were arrested and deported in 1969-70- Gal Costa, Tom Ze, and Os Mutantes). No one was safe from the state.

The goal of the study was to expose the brutality of the regime, and this was indeed successful, as every lst detail was placed within the covers of this book. It will likely take several generations to know if the study was a success in terms of curbing the violence and its hideous effects on the everyday person. Hopefully, it will help everyone learn from its collective past lest we be condemned to repeat it. A powerfully riveting study.