Brutality Garden

“An impressive and thorough look at Brazil’s all too brief Tropicália movement that is also one of the best books on music to come out in years. Neither unconditionally devoted nor coldly analytical, the genius of Dunn’s text is that it is essentially a history of Brazil’s relationship with globalisation. . . . [Dunn’s] book captures both the beauty and insight of the movement itself.” — The Wire

“Brutality Garden is an exhaustive and exquisitely researched history of the tropicália movement. He links superbly the social, political, economic, and cultural debates in Brazil to the movement, situating the music in larger, intersecting spheres of intellectual, artistic, and governmental activity.” — Ethnomusicology

“Christopher Dunn has produced an enlightening and thorough account that should become a standard work on Brazilian culture in the second half of the twentieth century. . . . A provocative and significant book.” — Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe

“Intriguing. . . . [Dunn’s] translations of songs, as well as [his] descriptions of the political and cultural landscape of Brazil during these tumultuous times are especially vivid.” — Down Beat

“Dunn’s attractively produced book takes the reader through the history of Brazil’s cultural movement — known as Tropicália. . . . Born out of Brazil’s own domestic vicissitudes, popular music is perhaps its most successful and widely known international intervention.” — Foreign Affairs

“Dunn does a good job of minimizing postmodern terminology and maximizing delivery of the facts, clarifying the Tropicálists' goal of shattering Brazil’s self-propagated image as a 'garden.'” — Library Journal

“From a northern perspective, this book is a window opening an alternative version of our own past, a cultural history of a parallel and magical universe — a universe fully equal to our own, although with the heat turned way up. The creativity, danger, humor, politics and weirdness mirror and match our own ’60s and ’70s, but it’s all just a little different. The feeling is that of encountering one’s own history for the very first time — it’s all familiar and yet completely strange. The issues this movement dealt with — race, identity, high vs. low culture, North vs. South — are all issues we ourselves deal with every day. Here are clues to the puzzle that is our own identity — clues picked up in an alternative universe and brought back and decoded.” — David Byrne

“Brutality Garden is a wonderfully synthetic and knowledgeable account of one of the world’s most profoundly innovative (yet little-known) cultural movements — Tropicália.” — Robert Stam, New York University