Calado Rodriguez

If you practice capoeira, you'll be sadly disappointed. I run a book club specifically on Capoeira and this book did not go over well. We anticipated a telling of the shared history of Candomble and Capoeira. The book, despite its length was very shallow in this regard. The fist half of the book describes Capoeira in a way that is overly simple and bias. The author willingly admits he has a lot of biases, which shown through in the worst ways. The second half is an equally shallow description about Candomble, which I know very little about. But considering the treatment of Capoeira in the first half, it's hard to take seriously the authors analysis or descriptions. In general the book feels like someone who enjoys Capoeira as a hobby decided to write two books about Candomble and Capoeira and then just paste them together into a single book. The book is also unnecessarily dense due to a lot of references to various western philosophers. Thankfully I've read some of the references the author made.... and they don't fit.... Like I said, the book was disappointing and I don't recommend it if you're serious about learning anything about Capoeira or Candomble. Our book club meeting was very short that week...