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Summary
Summary
For readers of Michael Lewis comes an engrossing tale of a country's spectacular rise and fall, intertwined with the story of Brazil's wealthiest citizen, Eike Batista--a universal story of hubris and tragedy that uncovers the deeper meaning of this era of billionaires.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE FINANCIAL TIMES
When Bloomberg News invited the young American journalist Alex Cuadros to report on Brazil's emerging class of billionaires at the height of the historic Brazilian boom, he was poised to cover two of the biggest business stories of our time: how the giants of the developing world were triumphantly taking their place at the center of global capitalism, and how wealth inequality was changing societies everywhere. The billionaires of Brazil and their massive fortunes resided at the very top of their country's economic pyramid, and whether they quietly accumulated exceptional power or extravagantly displayed their decadence, they formed a potent microcosm of the world's richest .001 percent.
Eike Batista, a flamboyant and charismatic evangelist for the country's new gospel of wealth, epitomized much of this rarefied sphere: In 2012, Batista ranked as the eighth-richest person in the world, was famous for his marriage to a beauty queen, and was a fixture in the Brazilian press. His constantly repeated ambition was to become the world's richest man and to bring Brazil along with him to the top.
But by 2015, Batista was bankrupt, his son Thor had been indicted for manslaughter, and Brazil--its president facing impeachment, its provinces combating an epidemic, and its business and political class torn apart by scandal--had become a cautionary tale of a country run aground by its elites.
Over the four years Cuadros was on the billionaire beat, he reported on media moguls and televangelists, energy barons and shadowy figures from the years of military dictatorship, soy barons who lived on the outskirts of the Amazon, and new-economy billionaires spinning money from speculation. He learned just how deeply they all reached into Brazilian life. They held sway over the economy, government, media, and stewardship of the environment; they determined the spiritual fates and populated the imaginations of their countrymen. Cuadros's zealous reporting takes us from penthouses to courtrooms, from favelas to extravagant art fairs, from scenes of unimaginable wealth to desperate, massive street protests. Within a business narrative that deftly explains and dramatizes the volatility of the global economy, Cuadros offers us literary journalism with a grand sweep.
Praise for Brazillionaires
"A wild, richly reported tale about Brazil's recent economic rise and fall, and some of the biggest, most colorful characters in business in Brazil who now have a global reach. . . . Cuadros's story really takes off when he focuses on Eike Batista, an over-the-top one-time billionaire who became the country's corporate mascot, only to go bankrupt in a dramatic unraveling." --Andrew Ross Sorkin, the New York Times
"In this excellent book [Cuadros] has managed to use billionaires to illuminate the lives of both rich and poor Brazilians, and all those in between." -- The Economist
" Brazillionaires [is] journalist Alex Cuadros's compelling tale of Brazil's superrich, which deftly weaves lurid soap opera with high finance and outrageous political skullduggery. . . . If Brazil sometimes comes across as a circus in this compelling, thoroughly researched account, it is because it can be just that." -- The Wall Street Journal
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Part memoir, part exposé, and part historical narrative, this fascinating look at wealth in Brazil is a strong debut for Cuadros, former Bloomberg News "billionaires reporter" for Latin America. It's not surprising that a country larger in size than the United States and home to vast natural resources has become one of the world's top economies. What is surprising is Brazil's number of billionaires-54 in U.S. dollars and 150 by the Brazilian real-and how quickly some got rich, such as oil magnate Eike Batista, who rapidly acquired $30 billion and then lost it all in just a year and a half. Born and raised in America, Cuadros relates his experiences as an outsider, writing that he sometimes "missed the codes" regarding issues such as race, religion, and government. While explaining how Brazil's billionaires "get rich and stay rich," he explores the role of agriculture, environmental regulations, corruption, and media. Touching on the last point, he describes how the enormous Globo TV network, owned by the billionaire Marinho family, frequently inserts didactic morals into its immensely popular telenovelas. Power is clearly the real impetus for the driven individuals profiled in the book. Readers will be eager to see what topic Cuadros tackles next. Agent: Howard Yoon, Ross Yoon Agency. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
I REMEMBER WHEN Latin America sent one of its tycoons to the top of the list of the world's billionaires. Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecoms-to-retail magnate, leapfrogged past Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010 to become the richest person on earth. Slim's rise fit nicely into the story of what is the most inequitable region of the world - a continent where gargantuan wealth coexists with abject poverty. But he was hardly alone. In 2010, Forbes magazine, the global plutocracy's official scorekeeper, counted nine Latin Americans among the world's 100 top billionaires. Among them was Eike Batista, a spanking new magnate from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Nowhere on Forbes's list just three years earlier, he was by 2010 the second-richest Latin American and the eighth-richest person in the world. And he was setting his sights even higher. "Slim had better clean his rearview mirrors because on one side or the other, I'm going to pass him," he proclaimed to Charlie Rose. Batista - Eike to Brazilians - portrayed himself as a different breed of titan, not a lucky scion, inheritor of past fortune, but a builder of empire. Unlike other rich Brazilians, he claimed, he didn't make his money from government contracts and political connections. He was, of course, the son of Eliezer Batista, a former chief executive of Vale, Brazil's state-run mining colossus. Yet he represented himself as the American-style entrepreneur of legend, pulling himself up by the power of his talent, will and perseverance. Ultimately, though, Batista was peddling aspirations. Part visionary, part snake oil salesman, he may have thought of himself as a bona fide creator of wealth, unique amid Latin America's coddled barons of industry and commerce. But what he sold, to eager investors at home and abroad, was Brazil's dream of greatness. And just as Brazil's dream collapsed, Batista's billions evaporated. The rise and fall of Batista is dramatically rendered in "Brazillionaires," Alex Cuadros's enjoyable, deeply reported account of Brazil's outsize collection of tycoons. Cuadros, a young American journalist, spent the last six years in Sao Paulo, mostly as the "billionaires reporter" for Bloomberg News. His job included calculating and recalculating the wealth of titans like the Marinhos of the Globo TV empire, of construction magnates like the Camargo family and even of Edir Macedo, the founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. This reporting provides the book's backbone. But "Brazillionaires" offers more than a flat collection of billionaire tales. Cuadros shrewdly presents his collage of immense wealth against an underlying background of corruption. There are kickbacks for government contracts. There are gigantic taxpayer subsidies: In 2009 alone, the state-run development bank, BNDES, lent out $76 billion, "more than the World Bank lent out in the entire world." And of course there are lavish campaign contributions, attached to the inevitable quid pro quos. JBS, which leveraged government loans to become the largest meatpacking company in the world, spent $180 million on the 2014 elections alone. "If every politician who had received JBS money formed a party," Cuadros writes, "it would be the largest in Congress." In his telling, Brazilians seem to embrace the cozy relationship between business and government as a source of pride rather than a risk for conflicts of interest. In one passage, Cuadros underscores the contrast between Adam Smith and the 19th-century Brazilian thinker José da Silva Lisboa, viscount of Cairu. Lisboa's "Principios de Economía Politica" was meant to be an adaptation of Smith's "Wealth of Nations." But rather than present a paean to the invisible hand of the market, the viscount offered a rather paternalistic view of economic progress. "The sovereign of each nation must be considered the chief or head of a vast family," he wrote, "and thus care for all those therein like his children, cooperating for the greater good." Swap "government" for "sovereign" and the passage still serves as an accurate guide to the Brazilian development strategy. It's just that some children - the Marinhos, the Camargos - are cared for better than others. Of course, Cuadros notes wryly, the winners in this rigged race to the top cannot help believing in their own merits. The nation, they insist, prospers because of them. They deserve their station in life. In a revealing moment, Batista tells Cuadros, "What's happening in Brazil is the Brazilian dream, and I happen to be the example." Batista is Cuadros's main antihero, occupying most of the book's second half. His virtue may have been timing. He burst onto the scene in 2008 just as Brazil seemed on the cusp of achieving its longheld aspirations to greatness, included alongside Russia, India and China in what came to be known as the BRIC countries. China was buying much of Brazil's production of iron and soy. Foreign investors poured money in. Batista wrapped himself in the flag. Backed with billions in subsidized loans from the state-run development bank, he sold himself as Brazil's future. By 2010, he had raised many billions of dollars from Brazilian and foreign investors for five of his companies. There was his mining giant, his power generator and his ports company. There was his manufacturer of platforms from which to drill for oil in Brazil's vast newfound reserves under the Atlantic. And there was the crown jewel, a petroleum company, which Batista promised would soon be pumping more crude than Oman. The government in Brasilia loved Eike's story, which fit snugly into its plan to build up national champions, lavishly funded with subsidized credit, that could go head-to-head with the mightiest multinationals in the world. BNDES, the only lender in Brazil that charged single-digit interest rates, lent billions to Eike's projects. And Eike loved the government back, providing lavish campaign contributions to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his successor, Dilma Rousseff. When Batista's luck turned sour - the oil wasn't gushing quite as he had promised, a grand port project at Açu was years behind schedule - President Rousseff wasn't in a position to bail him out. She became entangled in her own problems; this year legislators began impeachment proceedings against her for using the state-run banks to finance the government on the sly, and she ultimately let Batista go. Brazil has stumbled from its decade of grace. China is no longer buying as much iron and soy. Money has been flowing out rather than in. The International Monetary Fund expects the economy to contract by 8 percent between 2015 and 2017. And Batista has fallen from the Forbes list. But there are still 31 Brazilian billionaires, four in the top 100. Most, if not all, benefit in one way or another from the entanglement of business and political power. It would be wrong, however, to understand Brazil's plutocracy as the product of some unique outcrop of corruption. The hold on political power by the rich is hardly an exclusive feature of Brazil. Latin America has suffered for generations from the collusion between government and business. Where I grew up, in Mexico, it is the norm. Indeed, Cuadros is too smart to claim any exceptionalism. "This book is about Brazil and about billionaires," he writes, "but more than that, it's about how wealth is accumulated in the modern world and the stories we tell ourselves to explain this process." American billionaires also like to talk about their contribution to the world's prosperity, even as they pour money into American elections to purchase political power. "Amerillionaires" might not have to same ring to it. It would nonetheless ring true. Brazilians seem to embrace the cozy relationship between business and government. EDUARDO PORTER writes the Economic Scene column for The Times.
Kirkus Review
On the trail of enormous wealth in Brazilan engine of national progress or a trench of impoverishment? As an American journalist for Bloomberg News based in So Paulo from 2010 to 2016, Cuadros became both fascinated and appalled by the excessive wealth he witnessed. While the Brazilian nouveau rich used to ape the styles of the French, now it is the United States via Miami, where much of the Latin American wealth is invested. In this "parallel universe" of billionaires, the author became acquainted with the "ladder of luxuries" such as private jets, rarefied art and cars, pricey real estate, and restaurants. In this universe, the names on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index needed to worry constantly about kidnapping and protection of family members. The two tried-and-true ways of getting rich in the Brazilian economy were by politics and/or public contracts, and while many of the billionaires Cuadros covers were mired in graft and corruption scandals, the Brazilian saying "Rouba mas faz" (he steals but he gets things done) sums up the public tolerance for them. Cuadros dutifully reveals many of the major players: Paulo Maluf, the force behind the building of the so-called Minhoco (Big Worm) freeway, has become a kind of poster boy for patronage; soy baron and former Mato Grosso Gov. Blairo Maggi routinely battled environmentalists over issues of deforestation; Roberto Marinho built the dominant Rede Globo TV network; Edir Macedo fashioned a massive Universal Church of the Kingdom of God from relentless tithing of the faithful; Eike Batista, head of OGX Petroleo e Gas, went from being the richest man in Brazil to bankrupt. The debt that many of these men owe to the acquiescence of the government, namely that of former populist president Luiz Incio Lula da Silva and his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, is remarkablee.g., what has come to light over the skimming of profits from the massive Belo Monte Dam. Well-rounded and -researched portraits of the staggering chasm between rich and poor in Brazil. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In his first book, former Bloomberg News reporter Cuadros plunges into the world of Brazil's wealthiest citizens to explore the evolving economic and political events forming this nation as its power continues to grow. Billionaires such as business magnate Eike Batista, televangelist Edir Macedo, investor and philanthropist Jorge Lemann, and media mogul Roberto Marinho are but a few of the subjects whom Cuadros weaves into a larger narrative of a rigged system in which the "cordial man" consistently guides the direction and speed with which Brazil emerges as a global superpower. Bringing the World Cup and the Olympics to the area could have been an opportunity to improve the infrastructure and reduce inequality by expanding the middle class. Instead, argues the author, cronyism and corruption have created instability and unsanitary conditions. This is a solid companion to Juliana Barbassa's Dancing with the Devil in the City of God, which looks specifically at Rio de Janiero and the cultural extremes that continue to exist owing to many of the same issues described by Cuadros. VERDICT An entertaining and readable investigation of Brazil's ultrarich and their influence on shaping the lives of everyone else.-Barbara Ferrara, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 God Is Brazilian The New Brazil, Miami, and Hidden Wealth "I follow the rules that I built for myself." --Abilio Diniz (4 billion) A helicopter descended from the sky, its glossy body catching the oblique winter light. As it drew closer to me, a machine hiss overwhelmed that familiar deep faraway chop. Its little wheels perched gingerly on the roof of the São Paulo Sheraton. A pilot wearing wraparound sunglasses and pilot's headphones hopped out, slid open the back door, and set up a three-step ladder for us to board. He clasped his hands in front of him, waiting for us to get in, a chunky metallic watch on his right hand. It was 4:25 p.m. His punctuality was English, as Brazilians like to say. The helicopter wasn't for me. It was for a top editor visiting from New York, whose time Bloomberg News judged more valuable than the fifteen hundred dollars an hour it cost to hire a chopper to ferry him around. I was a twenty-nine-year-old reporter tagging along to meet a big newsmaker. I climbed aboard with three other colleagues, my knees touching theirs in the backseat. Everyone put on a pair of those headphones. As we rose into the air, the helipad retreated, São Paulo shrank. The Pinheiros River dwindled to a dark stripe, tiny cars filling up six lanes of freeway on either side. We left behind the Octávio Frias de Oliveira Bridge, a concrete X intersected by yellow cables supporting two crescents of road. We passed over office towers of gleaming dark blue glass, luxury condos of imitation granite, new buildings copying many architectural styles at once. I took photos on my BlackBerry, craning to see a city whose chaos seemed from this height to reorder itself in neat rows. The Bloomberg editor also sneaked a shot or two. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the trip was over. From the helipad we tromped downstairs into an office of many beiges--the carpets, the desks, the filing cabinets. We were in the headquarters of a company known as Brasil Foods, BRF for short. It was surprisingly quiet given that BRF was Brazil's biggest producer of packaged foods and the world's biggest exporter of poultry, feeding millions of Russians and Arabs and Chinese. We settled into a conference room to wait for the company's new chairman, Abilio Diniz, one of Brazil's richest men. He owed his four-billion-dollar fortune to his family's supermarket chain, Brazil's largest--another superlative. It was called Pão de Açúcar, Sugarloaf, after the iconic mountain in Rio. Abilio Diniz famously worked out several hours a day, running, lifting weights, boxing, and playing squash, even at seventy-six years old. He ate like a stereotypical Californian, avoiding the Brazilian staples of rice and beans and red meat. I'd seen a picture of him in a tank top doing the pectoral fly, and his face, lined and tan as a leather shoe, looked Photoshopped onto the body of a much younger man. Now here he was, bounding over to shake our hands, wearing khakis and a simple white button-up shirt, no tie. He sat down, and the Bloomberg editor jumped straight into the interview. This was a mistake. In Brazil, you can't cut straight to the chase. You need to ease into business, glide through some small talk, something about soccer, the weather, traffic. The other mistake was hitting him with the most obvious and least comfortable question first: How can you possibly be chairman of two public companies that do business with each other? Pão de Açúcar bought BRF's TV dinners and yogurts and smoked turkey. "In all my time as a journalist, I don't think I've ever seen such a thing," the editor later said. Abilio wasn't just chairman of both companies, he owned stock in them. This had led to a clash between him and his French partner at Pão de Açúcar, Jean-Charles Naouri. Alleging that Abilio's dual roles made for a glaring conflict of interest, Naouri had filed for international arbitration. The dispute permeated the business press. For Abilio, though, it was just his latest messy public battle. In the early eighties, his father had decided to hand out shares in Pão de Açúcar based on his children's performance in the company. Abilio got a sixteen percent stake while each of his two brothers got eight percent and their three sisters got just two percent each. Fights ensued, and as the alliances shifted, the siblings spilled their woes to a series of delighted journalists. In 1993 Abilio finally persuaded most of his family to sell their shares to him, cementing his control. Abilio spoke halting English as he explained to us that the legal issues existed exclusively in Naouri's head. There was no conflict of interest because Abilio felt there was none. "I follow the rules that I built for myself," he said. He bounced in his chair, looking from one to another of us as though being interrogated. Now and then he squinted at his PR people with a look of pained incomprehension, and they helped him explain what his English couldn't. Pressed on his dual roles, he snapped at last, in Portuguese: "Did you come to interview me, or did you come to provoke me?" The conversation kept on like this for twenty minutes, until Abilio glanced around and asked, "Okay?"--indicating our time was up. This was a man with a hierarchy of attentions. Journalists ranked low, though possibly above his press people. These he addressed without ever quite meeting their eyes, making offhand orders--"I'll take a water"; "You'll send me that article later?"--in the way of someone who rarely repeats himself. But there was more to Abilio than conflict. In recent years he'd become a champion of healthy living. He wrote a best-selling self-help book, translated into English as Smart Choices for a Successful Life, and created a sports research center to advise Brazil's Olympic athletes (and himself). Prepping before the chopper ride, I'd explained this to the Bloomberg editor. And so as Abilio began to hover from his seat, the editor's last question was "What about health?" Abilio settled into place again. His demeanor shifted entirely, his voice growing soft, quiet. His wife was forty-one, younger than all four children from his first marriage. With her he had a six-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son. He believed these were signs he'd been blessed, literally, with special vitality, and his duty as a Catholic was to share this gift with the world. "The thing inside Abilio is my faith in God," he said. "Okay?" Then he stood up, thanked us, and hurried off to other battles. The helicopter returned to whisk the Bloomberg editor to the airport, an eleven-minute flight that could take three hours by car during rush hour. I didn't get to join him this time. Instead I walked to the nearest bus stop, an island in the middle of six lanes of frenzied traffic. There was an aerial walkway, but a half-dozen people stood by the side of the road waiting to leap through a gap in the oncoming cars. They wore jeans, springy old running shoes, and puffy jackets whose color had faded in the strong sun of subtropical winter. In erratic dashes a few at a time, they surged across. Brazil was booming, but people still risked their lives just to get to work and back. Brazil sounded more idyllic when I was growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My parents told me stories about coming to Brazil in 1980. They had met by chance while traveling in Guatemala earlier that year, and made their way to Rio de Janeiro together. They went to a party with Jorge Ben Jor, the funk musician, and my dad first told my mom he loved her at a café in Copacabana. In their yellowing snapshots, they have long hair. I heard another kind of story from my godfather, a private investigator named David Sullivan. He lived in Brazil off and on in the seventies and eighties and married a Brazilian who became my sister's godmother. They later divorced, but he went on visiting the country up until his death in 2013. He used to tell me wild tales that ended with him greeting the morning sun on the beach, bleary-eyed after a night of adventure. Once he told me how, when he first arrived in Brazil as a twenty-something quasi-drifter, he met a woman on the street hawking apartments for rent. He made as though he had more than a few dollars to his name, a fiction she didn't even believe, he said, and she agreed to show him one of the units. Within moments, they were making love on the bare floor. Samba implicitly played in the soundtrack to these stories. David dismissed São Paulo as a secondary attraction, a place you go to work, so I skipped it the first time I came to Brazil. It was 2005, and David had invited me to the house he'd built on an island near Paraty, down the coast from Rio. I'd just graduated from a small liberal arts college, and I decided to spend a month down there with my college girlfriend. Since I already knew Spanish, I figured three hours of Portuguese lessons would be enough to prepare me. I was wrong. The taxi driver at the airport seemed to speak solely in nasal vowels, breaking here and there into a theatrical falsetto. I could barely understand a word. David received us in Rio. In Copacabana we walked the calçadão, the promenade whose white limestone and black basalt sidewalk forms geometric waves mirroring the waves offshore. Bronzed dudes in Speedos on the beach passed a soccer ball from head to chest to foot to knee without ever letting it drop to the sand. We passed the Copacabana Palace hotel where Brigitte Bardot stayed, and then we passed a nightclub called Help, and David told us stories about the prostitutes there. In the street, a ragged minivan burped along with the sliding door ajar and a dark-skinned kid hanging out, shouting out destinations to potential fares. Past the city, from the top of Corcovado Mountain, Christ the Redeemer spread his white stone arms to us. East was Pão de Açúcar, Sugarloaf, a giant thumb of rock poking up from the sea, with tiny tramcars creeping up and down distant threads of tramline. Corner shops offered the juice of dozens of fruits we'd never heard of, delicious flavors that just can't be compared to anything up north: jabuticaba, acerola, caju. Of course we couldn't help but notice the favelas. They crawled up the hills jutting from touristy neighborhoods, dull red cinderblock shacks stacked upon one another, crawling upward till they couldn't crawl farther. Along the way I meandered into Portuguese. I learned words with no English equivalent, like saudade, a nostalgic longing, and cafuné, the act of lovingly stroking someone's hair. Malandros are tramps who live off the occasional swindle--a category that, by consensus, includes most Brazilian politicians. But the malandro can also be a kind of antihero, because he gets what he wants in a country where most people struggle just to get by. My godfather told me about a malandro nicknamed O Cagão--The Big Turd--who seduced a whole town's married women yet always skirted retaliation from their husbands. The malandro's talent is jeitinho. If jeito means "way," then jeitinho is the "little way" around society's rules. A word like that suggested a culture very different from the one I'd grown up with. I was hooked; I wanted to learn more. In 2008 I quit my job at a publishing house in New York. My girlfriend had broken up with me, and I decided to take off backpacking around South America. I meant it as a salmon-like repeat of my parents' trip, except that I hoped to stay somewhere along the way and try my hand at journalism. I spent a month and a half in Brazil but ultimately settled in Colombia, which was much cheaper for a fledgling reporter. I'd been freelancing for a year in Bogotá when someone from Bloomberg called me up and offered me a gig in the bureau there. My idea of the company was so vague that I didn't even connect it to Michael Bloomberg, its billionaire owner and then the mayor of New York. Bloomberg News turned out to be the media appendage of Bloomberg L.P., which makes most of its billions by renting out financial-data terminals to bankers and investors for twenty-four thousand dollars a year. I knew nothing about finance and next to nothing about economics, and I was way more interested in writing about the poor. But I imagined the job would give me good reporting experience. More urgently, my savings had run out. So I accepted. With a few embarrassing errors along the way, I figured out the basics of quarterly profits, stock prices, bond yields. Surprising myself, I ended up fascinated by what I learned. Since I'd picked up some Portuguese while traveling, Bloomberg eventually offered me a job in São Paulo, Brazil's financial capital. I took it for a simple reason--I wanted to live in Brazil. Bloomberg was one of scores of foreign companies expanding in Brazil. Commodity prices were soaring, and the economy had just about doubled in size in a decade. In the wake of 2008's global financial crash, the GDP had stalled only briefly before revving up again. Some analysts predicted that, any day now, Brazil would surpass France and the UK to become the world's fifth-largest economy. The Brazil my godfather had seen in the eighties and early nineties, when prices at shops could double in a single month and forty million people barely earned enough to eat, seemed distant now. In a sign of its newfound credibility, Brazil had won its first-ever investment-grade credit rating from Standard & Poor's. The Economist summed up the mood with a cover that showed Rio's Christ the Redeemer statue rocketing skyward with the headline Brazil Takes Off. Excerpted from Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadance, and Hope in an American Country by Alex Cuadros All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Prologue: The Crash | p. xi |
Part 1 Roots of Wealth | |
Chapter 1 God is Brazilian | p. 3 |
Chapter 2 The Price of Progress | p. 31 |
Chapter 3 Manifest Destiny | p. 68 |
Chapter 4 Nation Building | p. 79 |
Chapter 5 Prosperity Gospel | p. 106 |
Part 2 The Brazilian Dream | |
Chapter 6 Visionary | p. 135 |
Chapter 7 Helping Hands | p. 152 |
Chapter 8 The Profit Motive | p. 192 |
Chapter 9 The Backlash | p. 221 |
Chapter 10 Too Big to Fail | p. 251 |
Epilogue After the Crash | p. 282 |
Acknowledgments | p. 289 |
Notes | p. 291 |
Glossary | p. 323 |
Index | p. 327 |