Black in Brazil

A few months ago, I was over at my friend Myra’s house, when she mentioned that she was going to be interviewed by Henry Louis Gates, the eminent Harvard intellectual and professor of black culture for a documentary about the black diaspora in the Americas. Myra is an author and professor of Bahian history at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador. Her latest book, O Jogo da Dissimulação, examines the construction of racial identity in Bahia following the abolition of slavery in 1888. As the nexus of Brazil’s colonial sugar cane empire, Bahia saw the arrival of more African slaves than any other port in the New World. more >>

The Making of Moon Brazil 3rd ed.

I’m always fascinated by inspiration and process, by how people get ideas and how things get done. Although my interest in the “makings of” extends across the board, I harbor a particular fascination with the behind-the-scenes workings of travel writing.

For this reason, I avidly gobbled up a recent post, by my Moon colleague, Laura Martone, who brilliantly evoked the joy and demonic obsessiveness involved in revising her latest edition of Moon Florida Keys.

For the same reason, I thought it might be interesting to share my own personal experiences in revising Moon Brazil, a task that involved several months of intensive work that I only just recently wrapped up. more >>