Best Rio de Janeiro Brazil Travel Guides
This second guide presents 927 bird species, 863 illustrated, that occur in just the southeastern Atlantic Forest biome (Mata Atlântica in Portuguese).
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"On the other hand, it is smaller than Ber van Perlo's excellent and comprehensive Field Guide to the Birds of Brazil (Oxford University Press), and the illustrations are larger. Also a consideration, the Princeton guides are a handy size, but the range maps are at the back of the book, separated from the species entries and pictures. In addition, there are individual guides for SE Brazil, for example, a very nicely produced book by Honkala and Niiranen A Birdwatching Guide to South-east Brazil, which has photos of the species and extensive information on the best birding sites in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo, and Sao Paulo (mainly in the Mato Atlantico) and what you might find there. In short, there are now several excellent references for birders chasing the close to 1900 species in Brazil, but there is still a need for small field guides, or even an app of this series of books."
"great book, nice artwork and very good descriptions of birds and habitats in the Atlantic forests."
"An extraordinary book."
"This was a gift and they loved it!"
"It is a great solution to the dilemma existing for comprehensive single-country field guides with respect to the many species-rich South American countries: either they are too large and heavy for field use because they have to cover so many species, or they give abbreviated species accounts, often lack range maps, and use small illustrations with twenty or more species crammed together on a single page. With the regional guide approach, you can have the best of both worlds: guides that are light enough to carry in the field and which have fully informative species accounts and large, high-quality illustrations. This guide follows the same format, has the same high-quality text and illustrations, and large range maps, as the first guide in the series, covering the Pantanal and Cerrado. –First, the guides lack any quick index to the birds; all field guides become much more useful with such indices, and every field guide needs one. Hence, serious birders may want to supplement this guide with other books, e.g. the van Perlo guide, which at least has more male and female plumages illustrated."
A mix of government documents, lyrics, journalism, speeches, ephemera, poems, maps, engravings, photographs, and other sources capture everything from the fantastical impressions of the first European arrivals to the complaints about roving capoeira gangs, and from sobering eyewitness accounts of slavery's brutality to the glitz of Copacabana. (Bryan McCann, author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro ). "Prepared by three leading Rio de Janeiro scholars, The Rio de Janeiro Reader offers a sweeping and in-depth exploration of the city. They would come handy on any course focusing on global history, the Black Atlantic, port cities, planning history (in addition to courses on Latin American history in general).
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"provides an interesting , colorful, and " smart" prospective on a history that was, until now, unknown to me."
From prizewinning journalist and Brazilian native Juliana Barbassa comes a deeply reported and beautifully written account of the seductive and chaotic city of Rio de Janeiro as it struggles with poverty and corruption on the brink of the 2016 Olympic Games. Her book is a moving examination ofthe immense charms, staccato violence and unfulfilled promise of the marvelouscity and of the heart of modern Brazil.--Michael Deibert, author of In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico. This splendid and accessible narrative is mustreading not just for the journalists, spectators, and athletes who will be inRio for the Olympic Games, but for anyone who has visited Rio - or not - andhas been caught up in the magnetic attraction of this spectacular andcomplicated city.--Dr. Herdescription of this massive change being attempted from on high and thedisruption to an entrenched society is informative, instructive and mesmerizingas she strips bare the glitter and glitz of the beaches and gives us the trueRio.--Bill Cusumano, Square Books (Oxford, MS). This splendid and accessible narrative is mustreading not just for the journalists, spectators, and athletes who will be inRio for the Olympic Games, but for anyone who has visited Rio or not andhas been caught up in the magnetic attraction of this spectacular andcomplicated city.--Dr. Juliana Barbassa brings usboth a journalistic and introspective vantage point of a country in the midstof a metamorphose with the unique angle of a native born Brazilian returninghome forever a foreigner after living abroad for much of her life with awell-worn passport.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Barbassa artfully takes the reader through a rollicking ride of prostitutes, crocodiles, tycoons, crappy apartment buildings, the World Cup fiasco and calls into question the dominant narratives of Rio's resurrection into a world class city."
"There's a fascinating tension here between the city's hopes for itself and troubled attempts to realize those hopes, and by weaving in her own family history, the author makes the stakes of the city's transformation personal, too."
"Her interviews with various "Cariocas" (a term used for the residents of Rio de Janeiro) shed some light on everything from politics to human rights and environmentalism, helping the reader to understand the joys and trials that face not only Rio's population, but also Brazil as a whole. The author doesn't attempt to cast down Rio or Brazil in a bad or a good light, but on how all the forces and events that led up to the present have helped how the world sees Brazil on an international level."
"Reviewed by Jim Platts. I congratulate Juliana Barbassa, the author of the impressive book about Rio de Janeiro, a beautiful city and host to many World events. These realities included gang violence, lack of environmental cleanup and community infrastructure, air pollution, prostitution, and moving people out of favelas for important urban projects such as the Olympics. It reminded me of my own experiences having visited Rio many times since my days as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1960s in Brazil, including Carnival, and, most recently, the World Cup with my family."
Best General Brazil Travel Guides
Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. The beauty of this story is not just that Roosevelts rich history could spawn a thousand adventure stories, but that Millards experience with National Geographic is evident in her beautiful scenic descriptions and grisly depictions of the Amazons man-eating catfish, ferocious piranhas, white-water rapids, and prospect of starvation. A story deep in symbolism and thick with research, Millard succeeds where many have not; she has managed to contain a little bit of Teddy Roosevelts energy and warm interactions between the covers of her wonderful new book.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"It has everything a reader would want: the mysteries and terror of the jungle, the incredible and deadly complexity of the river, the inept preparations for the adventure, the wild and unknown Indians of the region, needless deaths, murder, history, and the bigger-than-life story of the aging Teddy, his son, Kermit, and the rest of the exploration party. Millard's Churchill book was good, but it suffered from often static setting, mostly in a Boer prison."
"From reading bios of TR, I knew that he had taken an exploration trip to Brazil after he lost the 2012 presidential race as a third party candidate, but i had no idea that it was so harrowing. Finding out when it's too late to turn back that you are missing much needed supplies resulted in a major fustercluck."
"I learned a lot about Theodore Roosevelt and his families’ lives, political and world events during that era , Amazon exploration, geography, and the convergence of “civilized” versus Indian cultures."
"This book tells us the story of his last act of bravado and exploration when, after his political career has ended, he embarks on a perilous journey on an unmapped river in the heart of the Amazon jungle. The river itself, with its impassable rapids and falls, thwart the expedition to the point of despair, disease, exhaustion and very-near starvation. The men are forced to portage, dragging their supplies and heavy dugout canoes, long stretches of the river many times daily. Malaria is rampant, and particularly plagues Roosevelt's son, Kermit, who has accompanied him on the expedition, ostensibly to keep an eye on and protect his father."
"I always hate when I'm reading a book and I can't wait to do the rating because I hate the book."
Best Amazon Brazil Travel Guides
In 2003, David Miller left his job, family, and friends to fulfill a dream and hike the Appalachian Trail. David Miller's Top Five Items You Might Not Think to Pack for a Long-Distance Trek (But Will Wish You Did). Scissors: Scissors are better than a knife for common tasks like opening food packaging, cutting moleskin, or trimming your mustache. Chafing powder: Hikers disagree about whether hiking uphill or downhill is more demanding, but they all agree that hiking with chaffed, burning skin is less tolerable than the ups and downs.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I feel privileged to have been able to hike vicariously on both coasts by reading the books."
"I read a lot of books about the Appalachian Trail so the subject matter was not at all new to me but I enjoyed the humor interspersed at regular intervals throughout the book."
"If you think you're ready to hike the path this book is a must read. What I learned from such an enjoyable read is what I expect and so this book helped me to realize I need more miles under my boots before attempting the journey. Could I take the time away from home, work, television, and an easy life to hike through, getting back to nature?"
"Enjoyed my vicarious journey."
"This book is not just for hikers or outdoors people."
"If you delight in an author's ability to make the printed page a canvas; if you relish rereading a paragraph just because of how smart it was--you'll love this whether you're a hiker or not. If there is a criticism, I'd offer that he might have left out the few mild obscenities in exchange for broadest appeal."
"Our trips were no longer than 2 or three hours and we experienced no real hardships, but this book awakened the memory of those wonderful imagined hikes into history."
"The author shared his respective periods of pain and elation, as he successfully traversed the almost 2,200 miles on the Appalachian Trail."