WHY IS THIS COUNTRY DANCING? - Hardcover

Krich, John

3.42

12 ratings by Goodreads

9780671768140: WHY IS THIS COUNTRY DANCING?

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067176814X ISBN 13: 9780671768140

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1993

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An in-depth study of how the country incorporates music into its daily life and into its rituals for mourning and celebration

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About the Author:

John Krich's travel and sports writing, reportage and fiction, have appeared in Vogue, Sports Illustrated, the Village Voice, The New York Times and many others. His novel on the private life of Fidel Castro, A Totally Free Man, won a Special Citation, PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award.

From Publishers Weekly:

Over the course of three years during the late 1980s, Krich ( El Beisbol ) traveled from Rio to Sao Paulo to Sao Luis to Bahia to Recife to tiny Exu to create this uneven travelogue. In keeping with Brazil's famed fertility, each town has its own sound: some, such as samba , bossa nova and lambada , are well known; others, like carimbo , forro and baiao , are not. Most are represented in mini-discographies after each chapter called "Music to Read By." Those three years translated into three carnivals as well, in Bahia, Recife/Olinda and Rio, though Krich participates in the latter, as most Brazilians do, only through the overwrought television coverage. But it is the musicians who steal the show, men mostly who have combined music from Brazil's European, aboriginal and, above all, African roots with lyrics from the country's experiences of poverty, segregation, dictatorship and torture. Brazil is colorful enough (witness Alma Guillermoprieto's straightforward but interesting book, Samba ) without Krich's hyper-tinted prose, a collection of the pleonastic ("decadent decay"), the scatological (" samba of the 'Turd World' ") or just simplistic ("Brazilian television, like Brazilian culture, is fixed somewhere around the third grade.").
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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