In the Cities and the Jungles of Brazil

Drawing on stays made over a half-dozen years, Paul Rambali - a natural storyteller with a sharp eye for contradiction - dissolves the sugarcoating common to travel writing on Brazil. Carnaval and Copacabana take a backseat as Rambali propels us on a wild-side walk through this enigmatic nation on the brink.
Tracing back the abundant miseries of the Brazilians, Rambali goes from Third World megalopolis to virgin rain forest, where he is confronted with hard and perhaps irreconcilable truths about our drive to build cities, and our romance with the jungle.
Here is a country where gunmen are hired to get rid of the orphans who live homeless at the feet of luxury high-rises; where an illiterate population gets its news from TV soaps; where animist religion - Macumba - pervades everything, but an evangelical church, waging "holy war" against it, collects millions from destitute true believers, where gangsters provide shantytowns with everything from electricity to law and order.
Here is the last frontier of the New World, where greed, ambition, and folly are the circumstances of daily life.
In prose that is vivid, impressionistic, and occasionally novelistic, Paul Rambali captures Brazil's vitality even as he reveals its manifold paradoxes and absurdities. The result is an unsettling account of paradise lost, by a writer whose genuine affection for his subject never clouds the sharp truth of his vision.