Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World.

• Author: Holston, Mark

Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World, by Ruy Castro. Trans., Lysa Salsbury. Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2000.

The music may be well known, but the personal histories of the young geniuses who created such hit songs as "The Girl from Ipanema," "Summer Samba," and "Little Boat" were largely unknown to all but a small circle of insiders until the Portuguese edition of this book was published a decade ago. Its translation into English not only provides fans of this sophisticated style of Brazilian popular music with extensive firsthand information on the lives of the music's primary figures, composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and singer-guitarist Joao Gilberto, but the whole constellation of bossa stars as well.

Thanks to the author's breezy style, the reader is all but a mouse in the corner as a group of intellectually curious, middle-class Rio de Janeiro teenagers begins to plot a revolution--but one with guitars and voices, not arms. Spurred on by the initial breakthrough...