This was one of my mother's favorite books, though it seems dated now, and the arguments for a "scientific" approac…This was one of my mother's favorite books, though it seems dated now, and the arguments for a "scientific" approach to the questions of a national character (based on culture and economics) seem as stereotypical and misguided as those based on race and climate which it attempts to replace. I suspect much of her appreciation was for Freyre's style (she read Portuguese and I do not) which does seem to be carefully reproduce in Samuel Putnam's translation: "It is sad to relate that many of the fifteen-year-old brides died shortly after their marriage, while they were still no more than little girls, almost as they had been on the day of their first communion, without their ever having had the chance to round out into obese matrons and develop a double chin, before they had time to wither into little old ladies of thirty or forty years. They would die in childbirth -- vain all the promises and supplications to Our Lady of Grace or of the Good Birth. Before they had had time to bring up their first son, even; without ever having known what it was like to rock a real child to sleep in place of the rag dolls made for them by the Negro women out of castaway clothes. The little ones were then left for the mucamas to rear." (p. 366) Putnam's notes, like Freyre's, are extensive and serve to explain unfamiliar terms and practices, to identify people unfamiliar to a non-Brazilian audience, and to document the author's own use of English terms. The book includes of "Brazilian Portuguese, American Indian, and African Negro expressions, including botanical and zoological terms" which is valuable in its own right. The index is exhaustive. For a general reader, the interest of the book comes from its depiction of 17th to 19th-century Brazilian life and, for a resident of the United States, the very different …