Just over two years ago, in April 2014, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English and took the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Piketty’s book struck a nerve, helping to disseminate several ideas—among them that capitalism doesn’t automatically generate a reasonable or equitable distribution of income and that paying attention to the wealthiest 1% is necessary to understanding politics. Piketty focused on the concentration of wealth in 19th and 20th century France, the U.K., and the United States, places where the most data was available for those periods. But if Piketty had been—instead of an economist—a reporter working to understand the world that extremes of inequality have made today, he wouldn’t have looked at those rich countries. He might well have chosen to focus on Brazil, as Alex Cuadros has done in his new book Brazillionaires.

BRAZILLIONAIRES: WEALTH, POWER, DECADENCE, AND HOPE IN AN AMERICAN COUNTRY by Alex Cuadros Spiegel & Grau, 368 pp., $28.00

Cuadros, a reporter for Bloomberg, arrived in Brazil in 2010 with a Piketty-worthy mission: to investigate the lives not of the 1% but of the 0.0001%. Part of his job was to rank Brazil’s billionaires on Bloomberg’s global wealth list—a kind of “U.S. News and World Report” rankings of the superrich—as well as to report on their business deals and their personal lives. In Brazillionaires, he has consolidated and shaped those profiles into a propulsive and engaging portrait of modern Brazil.

Cuadros uses his portrait of the late media mogul Roberto Marinho, for example, to discuss how Brazil’s major media portray race, and through that, its ideas and ideologies of race. His chapter on Edir Macedo, a preacher in the “prosperity gospel” tradition, allows him to discuss changing religious practices. Although each chapter is built around a profile of particular billionaire, Cuadros includes accounts of his own reading as well as shoe-leather reporting. He visits community groups in the favelas and goes along on the $1500-an-hour helicopter rides his subjects use to avoid snarled traffic. The book may be more revealing than its subjects would like. In fact, it will not be available in Brazil: One of the billionaires in question was unhappy with what he saw in drafts and publishers got spooked.

The most important billionaire to the book is unquestionably Eike Batista. Eike, as he is known, rose as high as the global number 8 on the Bloomberg list of billionaires, valued at over $30 billion dollars. He was open about his ambitions to become the world’s richest man. Eike is a champion speedboat racer, has state-of-the-art hair implants, and was once married to Luma de Oliveira, a Playboy model and carnaval queen. One of their sons, Thor Batista, documents his enormous muscular torso on Instagram and, until not long ago, drove a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren valued at more than a million US dollars. Eike and his family could hardly be more representative of the billionaire playboy lifestyle of the global ultra-wealthy.

Eike also serves as a symbol of the problems of today’s Brazil, and about half of the chapters in Brazillionaires are devoted to him. In spite of what would seem to be fundamental differences in outlook and ideology, Eike forged a pragmatic working relationship with the governments of the center-left Workers’ Party. Until President Dilma Roussef was suspended from office by hostile legislators this May, the country had been governed by the center-left Workers’ Party since 2003, first under the metalworker and union organizer Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and then under Dilma (2011-2016). Before Lula took office, Brazil’s wealthy worried about what would happen when a Lula, a former socialist, assumed power. Eike himself described it as a regression. But Lula was determined to break the association of left-wing rule with economic chaos, and built alliances with Brazilian oligarchs.