BRAZIL: Land of the Future

An Austrian intellectual's description of Portuguese South America, warmed by the enthusiasm of a refugee from a country where he is up against a blank wall, for a country with limitless horizons. His philosophic comprehension of Latin Americans faintly echoes Keyserling, and his impressions of Brazil's great cities, Rio, Sao Paulo and Bahia, though deftly phrased, do not add up to much. Rather vague and poetic, on the whole. Like his own stroll through the capital, one ""wanders about for four hours, incapable of remembering the name of a single street"". The chapters on Brazil's history are done with more careful scholarship, so that the reader may understand Brazil's present through her past. As a whole, it lacks the incisiveness that gives punch to the best of current travel books. Smooth and pleasant but not vital.