Resenha de Bryan McCann (Georgetown University), publicada na Luso-Brazilian Review (inverno de 2003, n. 40, p. 146-147, prestigiada revista da University of Wisconsin-Madison, que pode ser encontrada na internet no seguinte endereco .Frota, Wander Nunes. Auxilio Luxuoso: Samba Simbolo Nacional, Geracao Noel Rosa e Industria Cultural. Sao Paulo: Annablume, 2003. 252 p. Bibliografia. ISBN: 85-7419-333-X During the dark years of military dictatorship in late-1960s Brazil, Sergio Cabral, a young samba maven and a member of Brazil's underground Communist Party, used to tell his comrades, "I don't know of anything more revolutionary than researching Brazilian popular music." Cabral meant to show that the nation's humblest members-its urban, Afro-Brazilian poor in particular-had bestowed upon Brazil its greatest cultural treasure, and that an accurate account of their contribution would reveal the injustice of domination by a feckless, cosmopolitan elite. Cabral's notion of a valiant popular soul informed the books he wrote over the next several decades, and was shared in several key respects by other popular historians of his generation, including Jairo Severiano, Ary Vasconcellos, and Jose Ramos Tinhorao. Although these authors often differed over both the particulars and the political implications of their research, they generally agreed that popular music lay at the heart of the Brazilian experience, that African cultural inheritance provided the bedrock for that music, and that commercial interest played at best a circumstantial and at worst a corrupting role in that music's development. Working outside the academy but following rigorous codes of research, they published an influential body of work that cemented a canon of Brazilian popular music first sketched a generation earlier. In the book reviewed here, Wander Nunes Frota terms this body of work the "semi-official history of Brazilian popular music," and sets out to question its very foundations. Frota's argument has two main thrusts-first, that the Brazilian popular music of the 1920s through the 1940s was completely dependent upon the rise of a commercial cultural industry, and second, that the "semi-official history" often overemphasizes a vaguely defined African cultural inheritance, thus obscuring the musical richness and social complexity of Brazilian popular music. In light of these arguments, Frota suggests, the broader cultural meanings imputed to the music-in particular the understanding of samba as a national symbol-stand in desperate need of reconsideration. On the first count, Frota is certainly correct, and the book's strength lies in its sharp delineation of a crackling electric archipelago of radio stations, recording studios and movie houses. Drawing on the formulations of Pierre Bourdieu, Frota describes this network as a field of cultural production, deemphasizing the heroic biographies found in the "semi-official history" and sketching an encompassing social and economic context in their stead. Frota suggests that by revealing this commercial connection-the "luxurious assistance" of the book's title-he gives the lie to nationalistic meanings associated with popular music, showing that the idea of national popular communion through samba was merely a pretext for economic expansion. But this is too pessimistic, confusing the ability to extract profit with the ability to mold cultural traditions. The recording executives got rich, but it was the sambistas