Jacob Blanc’s Searching for Memory follows the life of Aluízio Palmar, a former Brazilian guerrilla member who had fought against the country’s dictatorship (1964–85) and played a significant role in advancing truth and justice initiatives after the return to democracy—particularly in the southern state of Paraná. The biography, which relies on interviews with Palmar, oral histories with his family and activists, and analysis of the dictatorship’s intelligence and court records, not only skillfully traces Palmar’s personal life trajectory but also sheds light on how Brazilians grappled with the trauma and memory of the dictatorship’s repression.

The book’s first three chapters explore Palmar’s politicization as a student in early 1960s Niterói and his subsequent activity against the Brazilian dictatorship, which took over the country in 1964. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Palmar joined fellow activists in 1967 to form a small clandestine group named Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro that sought to launch a rural guerrilla around Iguaçu National Park in southern Brazil (another group with the same name became famous in 1969 for kidnapping the U.S. ambassador). The militants’ idealized notions of armed opposition, which featured gendered and romanticized perceptions of insurgency, were soon met by the harsh reality of the dictatorship’s state-sponsored repression. Palmar’s subsequent arrest, brutal torture, and imprisonment are examined in Chapters 4 and 5. It is in Chapters 6 and 7 that the particularity of Palmar’s history comes to light. He was released in 1971 in a prisoner exchange deal and sent into exile in Chile, where he found the support of the leftist government of Salvador Allende and reconnected with his wife and daughter who had traveled from Brazil. But Palmar decided to go back to underground life, moving to rural northeastern Argentina to coordinate the covert return of militants to Brazil. Life in the countryside became extremely perilous after the Argentine junta assumed power in 1976. As militants began to disappear around the Argentina–Brazil border, Palmar decided to cut all ties to Brazilian opposition circles and live clandestinely with his family in the Argentine country. As Blanc shows, the geographic isolation, lack of community, and distance from activism took a heavy toll on Palmar and his relationship with wife and kids.

The book’s last three chapters focus on Palmar’s renewed political activism during and after Brazil’s transition to democracy. In the context of the 1979 Amnesty Law—which pardoned political prisoners but also granted impunity to the dictatorship’s perpetrators—Palmar and his family returned to Brazil and settled in Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná. In the following decades, he led struggles for re-democratization and transitional justice that transformed Foz into a thriving hub of political and social activism. He co-founded an influential newspaper (Nosso Tempo), became involved in city governance, and coordinated several (though unsuccessful) attempts to find the bodies of six militants who were disappeared by the regime in the 1970s. Palmar also became a critical actor in national debates over the memory of the dictatorship, publishing a popular memoir and launching a website (Documentos Revelados) that provides access to nearly 100,000 records from the dictatorship’s archives.

Searching for Memory offers a refreshing methodology, based on close collaboration between Blanc and Palmar throughout the writing process. Blanc informs the readers when disagreements emerged between the two about narrative and editing decisions. He also pays attention to Palmar’s “memory script”—the way he refines, recounts, and transforms his narrative into a public story. Focusing on Palmar’s self-narration also invites gaps in the story. This is most evident in the sections on Palmar’s experience in Argentina and whenever the complex relationship with his family comes up. These lacunas, which Blanc himself recognizes, illustrate the potential challenges of a collaborative biography. But they do not undermine the significance of a remarkable story about an activist who “only know[s] how to make revolution” (181). Searching for Memory provides a valuable contribution to the literature on Brazil’s dictatorship and the Cold War in Latin America, inviting readers to consider the effects of authoritarianism and trauma on memory-making and political activism.