Over the course of three years during the late 1980s, Krich traveled from Rio to Sao Paulo to Sao Luis to Bahia to Recife to tiny Exu to create this uneven travelogue. In keeping with Brazil's famed fertility, each town has its own sound: some, such as samba , bossa nova and lambada , are well known others, like carimbo , forr? and baiao , are not. Most are represented in mini-discographies after each chapter called "Music to Read By".Those three years translated into three carnivals as well, in Bahia, Recife/Olinda and Rio, though Krich participates in the latter, as most Brazilians do, only through the overwrought television coverage. But it is the musicians who steal the show, men mostly who have combined music from Brazil's European, aboriginal and, above all, African roots with lyrics from the country's experiences of poverty, segregation, dictatorship and torture. Brazil is colorful enough without Krich's hyper-tinted prose, a collection of the pleonastic decadent decay, the scatological (samba of the 'Turd World') or just simplistic (Brazilian television, like Brazilian culture, is fixed somewhere around the third grade). This book can serve as an introduction to the big names and genres of Brazilian popular music, but doesn't begin to give an answer to the question it raises in the title.