During his first inauguration as president of Brazil, speaking before the National Congress in Brasilia, on January 1, 2003, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva famously declared, “If by the end of my term all Brazilians have the chance to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I will have achieved my life's mission.” It was the first promise he made after winning the election in October 2002, and one he would often repeat. In his long-awaited biography of Lula, John D. French mentions how “three meals a day” became one of the government's mottos in his first term. This, he argues, was “tactical brilliance,” as it provided his economic platform with a concrete image. Although, as the books shows, Lula's political success usually relied on his ability to trade in the realm of the tangible rather than in airy abstractions or rigid theories, pressure from the right during the 2002 campaign had forced the Workers’ Party (PT) to dilute its agenda to an opaque formula that, beyond a commitment to respect Brazil's international agreements, laconically promised “growth with stability” (315). It can be argued, however, that the fight against hunger also represented some of the deep conflicts in Brazilian society that shaped Lula's trajectory. In the inauguration speech, Lula presented an overview of his country's key historical achievements, from the colonial era to the present. Brazil was the agent of a narrative that was nevertheless constantly disrupted by a chorus that lamented, “However, it did not beat hunger.” In Lula's words, it would be his government's task, through its “Zero Hunger” program, to finally make prevail the “ethical imperative of putting together the strengths, capabilities, and instruments necessary to defend that which is most sacred: human dignity.”1The onslaught of the right-wing establishment would not allow a candidate who pushed further left to survive the electoral contest. As John French shows, Lula was well versed in the art of political compromise and managing “conflicting demands” (172) when it helped him reach his central goals. This ability to strategically concede and reach consensus is a key part of what the book call Lula's “additive and transformative politics of cunning executed by creating spaces of convergence across difference” (12). Crucially, during his time in power, his government would indeed set more ambitious goals and surpass expectations. It not only practically “beat hunger” but also helped tens of millions of people escape poverty, provided educational opportunities, and launched Brazil to global leadership as a model of growth with social change. Dignity, after all, could have a more expansive meaning, as in the values of a working-class intelligentsia promoted by SENAI, the professional school for skilled workers that so decisively shaped both Lula's career path and his understanding of citizenship (67).Still, that in the twenty-first century the promise to even fulfill the basic nutritional needs of its population was seen as bordering the dangerously radical reflects the endurance of grotesque historical inequalities and the effects of a century's worth of antileftist politics. Even the poor northeastern immigrant turned industrial metalworker, union leader, consensus achiever, movement builder, icon of democratization, and working-class hero had to dismiss all talk about “rupture” when the presidency seemed within reach. This is, above all, an indictment of large parts of Brazil's (and Latin America's) impossibly indolent ruling classes. Lula is to this day loved by popular sectors and ferociously persecuted and demonized as a far-left extremist by the well-off, despite leading Brazil to a wildly successful era—even by orthodox standards.2 These elites are not only unwilling to let go of any privileges in the name of universal human dignity: they see any hint of equality as an affront and are willing to fight it.Lula and His Politics of Cunning reconstructs Lula's life, in a trajectory that includes his childhood as a newcomer to São Paulo's periphery and his ascent in the worlds of industrial education and labor, union leadership, and regional, national, and even global politics. The book strongly emphasizes the relationship between Lula and the emergence of São Paulo, particularly the ABC region, as an industrial juggernaut. This is, of course, only fitting for a book authored by a leading specialist in the history of labor and the working class in ABC. It should also be noted that this reviewer, a scholar of Amazonian cities, could not help but marvel at how well documented the twentieth-century ABC seems to be: the center of an experiment in peripheral industrialization and urban growth, and then a central node of national politics, it received abundant attention from contemporary scholars, students, authorities, and, less pleasantly, all kinds of governmental informants. Many of the protagonists of its history have been repeatedly interviewed by journalists and scholars—including John French. Although he sometimes appears impatient with the amateurish mistakes and class biases of the young researchers at the University of São Paulo studying ABC during the 1970s, perhaps echoing the mistrust that Lula and his union peers often expressed about doutores and overzealous students, French makes exemplary use of these rich materials. He deploys academic studies, interviews, press publications, intelligence reports, and other sources for historical information, but also critically engages their context of production and treats these biases and blind spots as valuable bits of information that help illuminate class relations during the so-called Brazilian economic miracle.The sections that take place in Vila Carioca, São Bernardo, and São Caetano, which represent the bulk of the book, are wonderfully textured analyses of “a new Brazil coming into being in the metropolis's factories, markets, and makeshift settlements” (39), “a world in flux” where “nothing was rooted or grounded” (41). Beginning in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Greater São Paulo was at the cutting edge of the urbanization and industrialization of the global South. It was a region populated by rural immigrants, largely young families seeking jobs amid unprecedented economic growth centered around large, modern factories in sectors like automobile assembly, which required a substantial skilled and unskilled workforce. This modernization represented, in some respects, the final blow to the Brazil dominated by the rural old regime. The industrializing urban periphery fostered new forms of socialization, citizenship, and respectability, as well as new public spheres, all of which, at different stages and to different degrees, corroded patriarchal power, traditional hierarchies and practices of deference, and patron-client relations. A crucial institution in this constellation of changes, as French comprehensively establishes, was the trade union.These social changes were connected to major thresholds of Brazil's modern political history, from the Populist Republic to the New Republic, prominently mediated by the rise and fall of the military dictatorship of 1964–85. Trade unions were crucial allies of João Goulart, and his toppling in 1964 and the dictatorship that ensued have been described as “a coup and a regime against workers.”3Lula and His Politics of Cunning shows that workers played major roles in the ditadura as well. The relationship was deeply ambivalent and changed over time. During the early, “silent years of the industrial boom” (160), ABC's exploding economy, the internal fragmentation of the working class, the inability of the political left to connect with it, and the increasing menace of governmental repression meant that the new regime did not face considerable organized resistance from industrial workers. As a whole, they benefited from the boom (some sectors more than others), and the expansion of consumption was a key driver of the impressive economic growth. However, salaries were kept at artificially low levels through policies that “squeezed” them by adjusting them to inflation rates. After a shocking defeat in the 1974 legislative elections, a public image damaged by years of brutal state repression, and the eventual loosening of the repressive apparatus under President Geisel (1975–79), the dictatorship began to appear vulnerable. But it was only when it became public that the regime had deliberately manipulated the numbers to keep salaries low that its legitimacy among the industrial workers of ABC collapsed.Lula, a self-styled “walking metamorphosis” (366), was both a product of this unstable era and a major agent of change. French writes about the unstable structure of the immigrant family, the gendered mores in transition, the economic expectations and anxieties, ideological frameworks that could put two brothers at odds, and the personal transformations and contingent episodes that shaped the shy Luiz Inácio da Silva, who was not particularly interested in politics, into Lula, the most popular politician in the world. Although the book makes a strong case for the importance of analytically collapsing the private and public spheres to understand the relationships between individual and society, some facets of Lula's life inevitably remain relatively black-boxed. It would take a different kind of project to uncover more details about potentially important topics such as everyday life in the Silva household during Lula's childhood, his conduct among his futebol peers, or his behavior as a problematically pushy womanizer.French is careful to explicitly reject the temptation whereby in biographical studies “the individual's past is recounted in light of his future” (19) or to turn his life into an allegory. The book successfully dodges these traps but still allows readers to capture how Lula was very much a product of his time and place, and how it was possible for him to have such an extraordinary impact. The youngest child of a poor rural-urban immigrant household grew up in a tumultuous, industrializing urban periphery where formal institutions could be less important than interpersonal relationships. Crucially, he was a beneficiary of a key institution that was within the reach of these new popular urban classes: SENAI, with its education and professional development, and the idea of a skilled, intelligentsia-like working-class identity it promoted. It was there that Lula, in his own words, “had contact with citizenship” (68) for the first time. He himself experienced the social mobility it could afford. He also was the brother of a militant industrial union member turned communist activist and, as consequence, victim of the military regime's torture. He witnessed firsthand the factionalism within the union and the damage that even well-intentioned paternalistic outsiders like students and communists could inflict on the workers’ cause. And he learned from able masters about the intricacies and subtle politics involved in union leadership.Young Lula put his capabilities to use by cultivating a politics based on one-on-one horizontal relationships, empathetic listening, constantly renewed loyalties, and the forging of unlikely alliances and convergences. He embraced the zeitgeist, promoted by SENAI, of industrial progress with skilled workers as key agents of national modernization. He eventually took the chance to run for union office and made the best of the opportunities it provided to become an effective politician. He understood the importance of lying low and compromising in the face of a brutal dictatorship, but eventually led the opposition when the regime lost its grip on public opinion and the moral economy. Perhaps most importantly, in all these endeavors he showed a masterful grasp of the political culture in which he acted. As this book demonstrates from a diversity of perspectives, his were a time and a place ripe with opportunities to challenge traditional hierarchies, norms of deference, and sociopolitical configurations, but in which the old inequalities and power structures still held sway. This era of transition was suitable for his politics of cunning and for the use of the “weapons of weak,” at least until conditions were ripe for more direct airings of grievances and mobilization. French's conceptually sophisticated analysis of leadership makes clear that Lula's political rise was a two-way “process and relationship” that was “the causal link between consciousness and mobilization” (336).In the case of Lula, his emergence as a major political figure was inextricable from the crystallization of the metallurgical workers of ABC as a self-conscious, politically active social class, one of the key social movements in the opposition to the dictatorship, and eventually the base of a major political party. Lula and His Politics of Cunning thoroughly delivers on its promise of telling an important history through “Lula's relationships with others” (4). Analyzing his actions and “speech acts,” as well as their consequences, in their context, French provides not only a wide-ranging study of one of Brazil's most important politicians but also a superb political history of ABC and the social and cultural formation of the region's metallurgical working class.The book is less detailed when it comes to exploring Lula's ascent to prominence at the national and international levels. In contrast to the detailed examination of the workings of leadership and mobilization in the Metalworkers’ Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema, the construction of the Workers’ Party and its evolution into the dominant political force in Brazil and, arguably, Latin America, are painted with broad strokes. The book does provide important insights about some aspects of these processes, including the lessons of the 1989 presidential campaign, the Workers’ Party's innovative successful experiences in state and municipal governments, the transformations of Lula's image through time, the PT's alliances with nonleftist politicians, the parallel and competitive trajectories of Lula and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, an approach to Lula's international clout through his links (and a brief comparison) to Hugo Chávez, and, crucially, the progressive displacement of the Workers’ Party's base from the urban cores and middle classes to “really common people,” the poorest Brazilians and the inhabitants of Brazil's northeastern and northern regions: the povão.This final issue relates to some of the potential that the book opens for future research—Lula and His Politics of Cunning is already a hefty book. In its focus on the formation of the ABC's working class and on individual and collective consciousness, actions, and speech acts, the book's excellent analysis of the repertoire of manifestations of class antagonism and inequalities is often centered on specific subjective, psychological, and micro performative processes: the vocabulary of “peons” and “small fish,” the self-effacing interclass etiquette, the self-limitations, the “yes, sir,” the idea of people “out of place,” and notions of self-esteem, hierarchy, and respectability. French often dialogues with authors who frame class relations, subaltern agency, and interpersonal conflicts in similar terms: among others, Michel de Certeau, James Scott, and Erving Goffman. This framework, and his expertise studying the Brazilian working class, allows French to provide countless valuable insights on the topic. However, even if they do not reflect a specific class consciousness, it is not clear why the decisions of workers during the early years of the dictatorship, or those of Lula before joining the union largely out of professional ambition, are interpreted in the book as the result of “apolitical dispositions” (84) in favor of a focus on solving immediate, often economic needs. A crucial contribution of these perspectives to politics, and of French's own focus on the “embodied work” of all-too-human individuals rather than abstract categories, is to show that everyday interactions and hidden transcripts, including (perhaps especially) those that result from entrenched inequalities, are political. A future research agenda would do well to use this book as a starting point to unpack the politics of apparent worker passivity in the 1960s.The book also suggests the opportunity to explore class antagonism in broader terms, beyond its original base in ABC and the politics of cunning, in ways that connect with both Lula's origins and his inauguration speech. Although Lula ultimately adopted the identity of an urban metalworker and union leader, he was also a kid from the Northeast, if not from the drought- and famine-stricken sertão, still from surrounding regions where hunger (which he experienced himself as unemployed worker) and the immediate legacies of slavery were not unknown quantities for the povão. As a successful presidential candidate, as a popular president, and then as a kingmaker, Lula eventually obtained enormous and loyal support from these sectors. As president, he remained an unparalleled achiever of consensus, but he was no longer content with a notion of dignity limited to defeating hunger or with a politics that exploited the ambivalence of a society that was still moving on from the old regime. He promoted a more ambitious agenda, frontally attacking poverty and promoting social mobility. The PT's governments sent Black kids to fancy schools, gave rights to domestic workers, and established direct links with Brazil's poorest. His hegemony built on centuries of contained anti-elitist and anti-oligarchic frustrations, which had in part found an escape valve in the industrial boom of places like industrializing ABC, and which the military dictatorship paradoxically galvanized and struggled to contain. Successfully leading one of the deepest social and cultural transformations in one of the most unequal countries in the world, where slavery was just two or three generations away, was Lula's greatest achievement, and one that deserves detailed studies. So does the savage, rancorous reaction it unleashed. Brazilian elites could not forgive Lula for not stopping at three meals per day. In their vengefulness and class hate, they have now pushed Brazil to one of its worst political and humanitarian crises.