Capoeira: A Brazilian Art Form : History, Philosophy, and Practice

Capoeira weaves fighting, music, dance, prayer, and ritual into an urgent strategy by which people live, struggle, celebrate, and survive together. In this book Bira Almeida—or Mestre Acordeon as he is respectfully called in capoeira circles—documents his own tradition with both the panoramic eye of the historian and the passionate heart of the capoeirista. He transports the reader from the damn of New World history in Brazil to the streets of twentieth-century Bahia (the spiritual home of ca…