The Brazil Chronicles

As a young journalist at the Brazil Herald from 1979-81, Stephen G. Bloom spent his early professional years working in Rio's seedy Lapa district, surrounded by fugitives, drug runners, pornographers, and stealth CIA agents. Bloom shares the wild story of this English-language newspaper in The Brazil Chronicles. The expat newspaper was a breeding ground for a different kind of storyteller -- audacious risk-takers who told madcap tales of Amazon plantations, Confederate emigres, and lost Indian tribes. Several renown journalists cut their teeth at the Brazil Herald, including acclaimed New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc, Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, and an untamed Gonzo reporter by the name of Hunter S. Thompson.

Drawing from extensive archival research and more than 150 interviews with his former colleagues, Bloom's eye-opening narrative dive is both entertaining and academically rigorous. With a backdrop of coups, nonstop political instability, censorship, hyper-inflation, and weekends at sultry Ipanema Beach, The Brazil Chronicles doubles as a coming-of-age memoir, following young Bloom as he embarks on his quest to become a foreign correspondent, relocating to a foreign country to pursue under-the-radar stories and tall tales. His firsthand experience provides an insider, eye-witness account of the newspaper's colorful history, transporting the reader to its sweltering newsroom and delving into the multifarious lives of its eclectic, trailblazing, polyglot staff.

Even as Bloom weaves between personal narrative, history, and accounts from journalism luminaries, it's clear who the book's main character is: the one-of-a-kind newspaper itself.

Author: Stephen G. Bloom
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Published: 11/18/2024
Pages: 496
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.85lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 1.80d
ISBN: 9780826223159

About the Author

Stephen G. Bloom is an award-winning journalist and author of six nonfiction books, Postville; Inside the Writer's Mind; The Oxford Project; Tears of Mermaids; The Audacity of Inez Burns; and Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes. A former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Dallas Morning News, he is a professor of journalism at the University of Iowa.