No comments about Journal of a Voyage to Brazil.

No comments about Brazil, a description of people, country and happenings there and elsewhere,.

4 comments about FD Brazil 1983.

1. leave this badly written guide on the bookshelf and buy the lonely planet guide to brazil instead.



2. What a great guide to this wonderful country - not just a listing of tourist trappings, rather a substantial guide to the real Brazil. If you're interested in going beyond the tours and hotels, you should use this guide.



3. The book, frankly speaking, stinks. All it does is it creates dead weight for you to be carrying. You'll definitely be better off using other travel guides (e.g., Lonely Planet) or even inquiring at your hotel desk. Only about 10% of the information in the book is actually somewhat useful. It is otherwise rather USELESS!



4. THIS IS A REVIEW FOR THE 2004 EDITION. THE OTHER REVIEWS HERE ARE FOR AN OLDER EDITION. I used this book for a trip in November 2004. The Fodor's guide was good for the major places I traveled to (Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Rio), but didn't cover the more obscure places in the south of Bahia or even some places close to Salvador. However, it was really nice to have this book to compliment (save me from using) the crappy Lonely Planet book all the time. At least I got a second opinion! The Rio coverage is pretty good and this was the most up-to-date book I used. Apart from the LP city guide to Rio. The Fodor's menu guide in the back of the book really came in handy. Ultimately, none of the guides to Brazil seem superb, so I recommend taking at least two and plenty of grains of salt.

No comments about Green Horizons: Travels in Brazil..

1 comments about Brazil: A Country Study (Area Handbook Series).

1. This 5th Edition is greatly updated since the 4th Edition, and should be used in place of earlier editions. It is an admirable source of information on Brazil's history, social structure and institutions, the economy, the government, the military, and on Brazil's efforts in science and technology. It cannot substitute for more specialized works, but I use it as my first stop when looking for information on anything about Brazil that I have no personal knowledge of and no detailed reference works on. It should be the first book on Brazil acquired by anyone with any serious interest in any topic concerning Brazil.
   
   This being said, I do have some criticisms; the book is not perfect. Most important, although some sections have been completely rewritten since the 4th Edition, others have not, and there is no indication of which ones have and which ones haven't. This can seriously mislead a reader who assumes that a specific item of information is accurate as of the 5th Edition publication date of 1998,if it happens to be an obsolete item from ten or fifteen years earlier. As an example, in the discussion of Brazil's exports, there isn't a hint that by the time of publication of the 5th Edition, the largest single export of Brazil was commercial passenger airliners produced by EMBRAER, which has become one of the world's four largest manufacturers of passenger airliners, below Airbus and Boeing, but competing nose-to-nose with Bombardier, and encroaching on the low end of Boeing's market so severely that Boeing recently discontinued the 717 because it can't compete effectively against the EMB-170 and EMB-190 of EMBRAER. This striking omission is due entirely to the fact that the section on exports was not updated for the 5th Edition. I could cite various other such examples, but this one will suffice to indicate the way in which a reader might be misled.
   
   A less serious but still significant problem is that the bibliographies at the end of each chapter refer almost exclusively to works in English. To be sure, most casual readers about Brazil will not know enough Portuguese to tackle serious publications in Portuguese, but many serious readers will be comfortable reading Portuguese, and most of the most important source works were written in Portuguese by Brazilians and have not yet been translated into English (although some have). The chapter authors themselves have clearly drawn heavily on documents in Portuguese, and the editors should have done readers the courtesy to cite in the bibliographies the most important of these.
   
   Finally, to my great surprise, the book does not seem to have been reviewed by knowledgeable reviewers, although it did get editorial review. This omission is undoubtedly responsible for many of the minor errors and omissions that mar the work; I recommend that a reader who needs to depend on any specific statement of fact in this book check it agains other sources. Some of the errors are just hilarious; for example, on page 94 I find the assertion that the Ucayali river, a Peruvian tributary of the Amazon, is 6,762 kilometers long. A moment's thought reveals the implausibility of Peru, whose longest dimension is just over 2000 kilometers, containg a river 6,762 kilometers long. The Ucayali is indeed a large and important river, but its actual length is slightly less than 1500 kilometers. Unfortunately, many of the other minor errors are less obvious, unless one has lived in Brazil, has friends there, and keeps up with events and changes in the country.
   
   Despite these caveats, though, the book is first rate overall, and an excellent starting point for learning.

No comments about Rio, Here We Come (Postcards from South America Series).

No comments about Wings against the blue.

No comments about Matto Grosso.

No comments about Voyage to Buenos Ayres,: Performed in the years 1817 and 1818, by order of the American government, ([Phillips, Richard, Sir, pub. A collection of modern ... travels. 3d. ser.: New voyages and travels).

No comments about Hans Staden,: The true history of his captivity, 1557, (The Broadway travellers, ed. by Sir E. Denison Ross and Eileen Power).