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The Accidental President of Brazil
Fernando Cardoso
A Memoir - What is it like to govern one of the world's most notoriously ungovernable, most vibrant countries? Brazil's former president offers a candid, wry, illuminating view
PublicAffairs
March 2006
291 pages ISBN: 1586483242 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Fernando Henrique Cardoso received a phone call in the
middle of the night asking him to be the new Finance
Minister of Brazil. As he put the phone down and stared into
the darkness of his hotel room, he feared he'd been handed a
political death sentence. The year was 1993, and he would be
responsible for an economy that had had seven different
currencies in the previous eight years to cope with
inflation that had run at 3000 percent a year. Brazil had a
habit of chewing up finance ministers with the ferocity of
an Amazon piranha. This was just one of the turns in a largely unscripted and
sometimes unwanted political career. In exile during the
harshest period of the junta that ruled Brazil for twenty
years, Cardoso started his political life with a tentative
run for the Federal Senate in 1978. Within fifteen years,
and despite himself, this former sociologist was running the
country. And what a country! Brazil, it is often said, is 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 sophisticated music and brutal gold-digging,
of the next global superpower and the last old-time coffee
plantations. It is gloriously ungovernable, irrepressibly
attractive, and home to the family, friends and
extraordinary life of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. This is his
story and his love song to his country.
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