Biographer of Brazil: a journalist at heart, Ruy Castro captures the verve and rhythm of a nation through his insightful, works.

• Author: Holston, Mark

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An obsession for uncovering and documenting hitherto unknown facts and obscure details may be the defining character trait of Brazilian writer Ruy Castro. While he has emerged over the past two decades as his country's most successful biographer and has recently added fiction writing to his resume, he remains very much a journalist at heart. In many ways he's the same untiring beat reporter he was 41 years ago when he began covering stories on the gritty byways of downtown Rio de Janeiro for a daily newspaper. Just like then, when he courted danger while reporting on antigovernment protests, scandals, and homicides, he is always in search of just one more fragment of information to make the story complete.

Perhaps that's why, after a wide-ranging interview of several hours, he chuckles, motions for me to turn on my tape recorder for one last time, and then asks point blank, "Don't you want to know about my marriage?" Yet another detail needed, in his thinking, to produce a perfectly-balanced prone. It's common knowledge that Castro is married to Heloisa Seixas, a popular novelist. But he wants it understood that they don't live together and that they share six cats; he keeps two in his Leblon apartment while she has two at home and two in her Ipanema office. With scant prompting, the gregarious writer also volunteers that he was an alcoholic; that he is embarrassed by Brazilian president Lula Da Silva's often-stated fondness of his book about a legendary futbol player; that when he turns in for the night, he reads only books in French and English; and that he knows which restaurant in Rio serves the very best feijoa mantega--buttered beans--in the whole world. Details.

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Although the 60-year old writer was born in the small town of Caratinga in the neighboring state of Minas Gerais, he has become almost exclusively associated with carioca themes--the culture and personalities of his adopted home city. Castro has authored three definitive books on various aspects of the Rio-born bossa nova popular music movement of the 1950s and of the dozens of composers, musicians, vocalists, producers, and other players who spawned a global craze that reverberates to this day. His biography of the 1960s-era soccer star Garrincha, Castro's most internationally successful book, captured the imagination of sports fans throughout the world. Rio de Janeiro: Carnival Under Fire, one of three of his books that have been translated into English, is a gripping profile of one of the world's most beautiful, and most dangerous, cities, while Carmen, his lavish treatment of the life of Carmen Miranda, Brazil's immortal actress and singing star, was a career-defining triumph that he finished while battling life-threatening throat cancer. Over the years, he has published books devoted to the life of Nelson Rodrigues, the country's preeminent playwright, as well as Portuguese adaptations of Alice In Wonderland and other children's stories, and a compilation of dozens of his essays on popular music, Tempestade de Ritmos. He compiled and edited O Melhor do Mau-Humor, a popular collection of some 1,600 bons mots[clever sayings], and wrote Ela e Carioca, an encyclopedia of the famous Rio borough of Ipanema. Today, he juggles research on new book projects with writing regular columns for one of Brazil's major newspapers, Folha de Sao Paulo, all crafted with his deliberate but lightening fast hunt-and-peck style of typing. At the same time, two critically-acclaimed works of historical fiction, the just-published Era no Tempo do Rei, set in the royal court of emperor Dora Pedro I, and Bilac Ve...