... a sweeping collection committed to making the voice of the Other heard ... Perhaps most striking in Brum’s work is her prose ... Brum asks readers to identify with the humanity she reveals in each of her subjects ... Brum’s collection shows the dance that occurs between a journalist and her subjects in the course of their shared conversations. Her writing is an exercise in compassion in its truest form—she’s willing to 'suffer with' and to reveal the suffering of both her subjects and herself. Readers are not spared the painful details ... In confirming the humanity of those whom we might easily overlook, Brum’s writing is a call to greater awareness of the lives around us ... is both reportage and a challenge to those of us living lives of comfort and privilege. She asks us to step out of our worlds, to join her in her quest of becoming an 'intimate foreigner' in the lives of others. In the worlds we enter in these stories, our task is to be the reporter Brum strives to be: one who mostly listens.

... readers glimpse the everyday of 'ordinary' Brazilians ... For Brum, who carefully explains in her introduction that 'a news story means stripping off the clothes of ourselves to don the Other,' every report is a chance to demonstrate compassion and love for the people who manage to invent a meaningful life from near impossible beginnings ... Beautifully translated from Portuguese by Whitty, these accounts make up an unforgettable compilation documenting the lives of those largely underrepresented in literature. While the stories are specifically Brazilian, the insights they reveal are universal.

The Collector of Leftover Souls can seem like an idiosyncratic hodge-podge, but therein lies its charm; it contains as much life and oddball personality as Brum's subjects. The collection puts particular focus on the victims of so-called progress--the economic modernization that has made Brazil a global player. The stories also showcase Brum's lyricism, perhaps a surprising quality for a reporter ... While...not an oral history, the pieces heavily feature quotations from their subjects, the source of many of the collection's most devastating, poetic lines ... While Brum does not shy away from the violence and poverty that sometimes overshadow Brazil's reputation, her talent is in profiling and humanizing people who are too often treated as an undifferentiated mass. In the process, she honors their pursuit of joy and justice—their everyday insurrections.

... a compassionate trek through Brazil’s peripheries, where the poor and the marginalized reside. As [Brum] mines urban favelas and Amazonian villages for stories, Brazil’s violent past and uncertain present come looming out of the shadows ... It’s clear that Brum reveres the act of listening ... Along with the stories, Brum has a knack of eliciting the perfect quote, the line that captures a life ... While the collection is shot through with tragedy, at times it’s also comic. This is partly due to the characters Brum meets. Many of them are hustlers, illiterate stoics imbued with wisdom, wisecracking heroes of their own back yards. It’s also the prose, which has an antic, almost surrealist, energy. The essays are full of bric-a-brac, arcane rituals, and droll nicknames ... The book has one small blemish. In contrast to Diane Grosklaus Whitty’s terrifically fluid and idiomatic translation of the essays, the Introduction at times comes across as awkward and stilted ... These oddities are in no way representative of the rest of the book. Overall, this is a superb chronicle of marginalization, a collage depicting a continent-sized country still finding its way nearly 200 years after independence.

El País columnist Brum...adheres to a method of listening carefully and letting her subjects unravel the story themselves ... Brum writes eloquently of people mired in the doomed cycle of poverty, most of whom can’t get a leg up because there is no support ... Among many other poignant stories, the author describes the teeming underbelly of the favelas in Brasilândia, the desperately poor gold prospectors in Eldorado do Juma, a defiant elderly community in Rio de Janeiro, and a threatened clan of Indigenous people deep in the heart of the Amazon. Ordinary lives rendered extraordinary by a master journalist who captures all their perplexity and quiet rebellion.

In this vibrant collection of profiles, journalist Brum...explores the lives of people from communities across Brazil with empathy, transporting the reader to the forest of Amazonia, the favelas of São Paulo, illegal mining camps, and beyond ... Brum’s measured handling unites her subjects through a compassionate, even celebratory, tone ... Throughout, Brum shows how her subjects, people excluded from wealth and privilege, resist in a myriad of ways the society determined to marginalize them. Thanks to her sensitive and adventurous reporting, this book is one full of people and stories not soon forgotten.