In the Cities and Jungles of Brazil

The author of French Blues provides a surrealistic study of the richly complex country of Brazil, capturing its teeming cities, poverty-stricken homeless and luxury highrises, endangered natural resources, death squads, and ethnic diversity. 10,000 first printing.

In Rio, we're told here, a hired gun will kill a child for $70; the price for an adult is $250. Between 1984 and 1989, nearly 1400 minors met violent deaths, most of them 14 to 18 years old, but 59 of them were under 10. Crime, poverty and corruption are integral parts of the appallingly poor, fabulously rich, gay, sad, innocent, decadent, magical and sensuous Brazil scene which Rambali ( French Blues: A Journey in Modern France ) depicts with affection, horror, intimacy and keen perception. As both a teller of tales and an incisive reporter, he covers the society across its many tiers, from the Indians of the denuded rain forests to the towers and slums of Rio, its sexual scene, intellectual and artistic life, festivals, history, politicians, media moguls, criminals and party-goers. Into this glittering fabric, Rambali weaves his love affair with a Sao Paulo university student and his perceptions of various friends and acquaintances. No conventional travelogue, this is a vivid profile of a vast, complex country.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From British writer Rambali, now a Paris-based TV documentary- maker: a vivid and atmospheric portrait of Brazil that unfortunately skates along the surface of its subject. Rambali conveys some of the sights and experiences of Brazil that escape more ponderous books: the lives of the poor in So Paulo; the lives and, too often, deaths of the extraordinary number of abandoned young children; a journey on the Trans-Amazon Highway, built with strategic abandon by the armed forces and still little used; and the smell of Brazil, ``the hot, sweet smell of baking sugar that wafts from the padarias, the bakeries and the coffee shops; and the smell of Gasohol, the potent mix of sugar-derived alcohol and gasoline that powers many of the cars.'' Rambali also describes more customary phenomena--TV, soccer, and the beaches-- and occasionally he finds novel ways to describe what he sees. Of the proximity of the poor favelas to the city of Rio, he notes that ``if you want to steal a television...you don't have to ride a bus for three hours.'' As for businesses' learning to cope with inflation, he observes that airline tickets, which are refundable, have become a good hedge, with the result that empty airplanes take off. Generally, however, his insights are conventional (beyond the modern facades ``lies a raw, wild and still unsettled territory''), and Rambali apparently chooses not to go deep--as in his dismissal of the complex, subtle, and endlessly fascinating subject of race relations in Brazil merely with the making of a repeated ironic contrast between the multiracial nature of the country and its supposed belief that it's a ``white nation.'' In all, a good guide to how Brazil looks, smells, and feels; not so good on what makes it tick. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.