In Favela: Four Decades of Life on the Edge of Rio de Janeiro, Janice Perlman offers an in-depth study of life in the 1,020 favelas of Rio de Janeiro. January. She attempts to move and re-interview her previous subjects. Perlman returned to the infamous slums of Rio de Janeiro to follow four generations for 40 years. She interviewed nearly 2,500 people, including the children and grandchildren of her subjects. She combines detailed personal accounts with insightful analyzes of the urbanization of poverty, the implications of public policy and drug trafficking. She also expresses her deep understanding that favelas are not simply slums filled with despair, but communities; in fact, many residents stayed there by choice. The central theme of Favela is to provide more information on urban poverty and social mobility. She offers compelling counter-perspectives that add hope to what is understood about urban poverty in Latin America. She writes using compassion and personal stories to describe larger topics supported by statistical analysis. Perlman's research provided evidence of an overall improvement in living standards and a surprising increase in upward mobility, particularly among families with fewer children. However, not all of his subjects emerge from poverty. She discovers many innovative social interventions (by community organizers, non-governmental organizations and international agencies) which, if replicated, could have many benefits. Perlman worries that Latin America's emerging democracies have so far failed to fully integrate their growing urban populations and create enough quality jobs. But their uplifting reporting from the periphery provides a solid basis for reasoned optimism. F...... middle of article...... Given the scope of the study (i.e. a 30 year period, half a dozen neighborhoods, thousands of individual lives), the complexity of the subject matter, and the absence of recent ethnographic field work, many of these findings are not fully explained, but educated guesses are provided. Favela addresses several topics relevant to urban researchers and, given the growing economy and changing national infrastructure, studies like this will only become more urgent in the years to come. The book provides powerful insight into the feelings, motivations, and perspectives of the population studied. Overall, Favela provides a sensitive and well-researched vision of the world of urban marginality in the 21st century and calls for “more prolonged involvement”. (p. 339), as Perlman says, to match behavioral trends established in surveys with the practices and worldviews of actors..