BANDEIRANTES AND PIONEERS

A double-barreled achievement: an historical journey into the contradictions and confluences of the USA and Brazil; a lively polemic on the nature of reaction and progress, which makes a thoughtful and highly persuasive contribution to intercultural understanding. The Brazilian author, Vianna Moog, seems to be a man of two lands. His examination of our Yankee pioneers, though owing something to Weber's Protestant ethic, presents a penetrating picture of psychological motivations and socio-economic movements, original enough in its own right, while his complementary analysis of the Latin bandeirantes, the colonial conquistadores, is a bright, bustling storehouse of folklore and foibles, of Old World temperaments settling with a sigh into New World challenges. That sigh, that indifference to get-up-and-go ideologies, is why Brazil's powerful potential has never been fulfilled. However, he suggests that his country is psychically healthier than our machine-ridden metropolis and steers towards a surprisingly unhackneyed reevaluation and possible exchange of values between the two. A spirited work and a necessary one for today.