Brazil has long been an enigma to outsiders.

Over the last two decades alone, Latin America’s largest and most populous country has been celebrated as a vibrant new democracy with a powerful economy, and derided as a nation in complete disarray heading toward the status of a failed state.

In this vibrant and smart book, Joel Wolfe tells the story of this “incomplete nation” and its two-hundred-year-old struggle to control its vast national territory and to fashion and maintain a functioning democracy against a backdrop of intense inequality, racial discrimination, and regional rivalries.

From independence to the abolition of slavery, from scarring military dictatorship to the election of President Bolsonaro – the “Tropical Trump” – and his defeat by former President Lula da Silva, the author weaves a rich portrait of a country fighting against the odds to overcome the long-standing and seemingly intractable problems that have, for most of its history, hindered national unity and development.