"The family of Fernando Henrique Cardoso has been intimately involved with the political life of Brazil since his grandfather was one of a group of army officers who deposed the Emperor Dom Pedro II and ushered in the modern republic. But the history of Brazil until recently is of a country in which it is perhaps easier to overturn a government than to make one effective. The Communists tried to overthrow it: the army succeeded. One president was a suicide, another mysteriously quit and disappeared just a week after decorating Che Guevara." "Cardoso himself was an academic sociologist by training who had little initial enthusiasm for the "family business" of politics. And even when he had embarked on a political career it seemed doomed. He was asked to be Finance Minister in 1993. He hesitated: Brazil had had seven currencies in the previous eight years to cope with inflation that had run as high as 3,000 percent a year. Brazil had a habit of chewing up finance ministers with the ferocity of an Amazonian piranha. Despite his misgivings, Cardoso was appointed anyway, the latest turn in a largely unscripted and sometimes unwanted political career which, seventeen years after his first tentative run for state senate, saw the former sociologist running the country." "And what a country! Larger than the continental U.S., with 190 million inhabitants, Brazil is often said to be standing on the edge of modernity, striding with one foot in mid-air towards the future, the other still rooted deep in a traditional past. It is a land of cultural sophistication and brutal poverty, at once the next global superpower and the last vestige of the plantation economy. It can be gloriously ungovernable, but it is also irrepressibly attractive, and is home to the family, friends, and life of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. This is the story of Cardoso's Brazil, and Fernando Henrique's love song to his homeland."--BOOK JACKET.