Overview

Eduardo Galeano is determined to forget that history is usually written by the victors. He favours the voiceless and the vulnerable. Mirrors is a narrative history of the world that condenses into its scintillating fragments radically altered visions of the landmark events on this earth, and of the landmark individuals who pass history from hand to hand in the official guidebooks. Yes, it is a book for the young provocateur, the young utopian, or the utopian remnant left in all of us, but it is so outrageously bold, skilfully dramatic and ingeniously clever, refracting as it does any number of memorable characters and events through Galeano's red-rose-tinted lens, that even the exhausted ex-communist or cardboard-conservative reader might be amused, challenged or overturned by it. It is another kind of history writing altogether, entirely reliant on the fireside storyteller's skills, but grounded in an unimpeachably wide and broad reading and understanding of events. What Memory of Fire, Galeano's legendary interpretation of all of South American history, did for that one continent Mirrors does for our entire sorry, sparkling planet.

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9781846272202

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Reviews

'Brightly coloured commonplace book of a kind that was once popular in our culture but has now almost disappeared - The beauty of Galeano's book lies not just in the eclectic choice of stories he tells, but more especially in his elegant, pared-down prose, sensitively translated by Mark Fried, with never an unnecessary word, nor one out of place - Galeano's book is pure delight - a cornucopia of wonderful stories. It should be by everyone's bedside - and in every Christmas stocking' Richard Gott, Guardian (28/11/09) 'Galeano charts the rise and fall of civilisations with compassion and wry humour - [He is] an enchanting interpreter of history and its resonances, and a poetic voice of political dissent' Siobhan Murphy, Metro (26/11/09) 'In his most ambitious work since Memory of Fire Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano retells the history of the world from the point of view of the powerless, the voiceless and the dispossessed. As in Memory of Fire, he presents his story as a series of short vignettes, one longer than a page and most a good deal shorter; their cumulative effect is shattering' London Review of Books (03/12/09)

Author Information

Eduardo Galeano's works, which have been translated into 28 languages, include Memory of Fire; Soccer in Sun and Shadow; Days and Nights of Love and War; The Book of Embraces; Open Veins; and Voices of Time. Born in Montevideo, he fled in 1973 after the military coup's leaders imprisoned him, and lived in exile first in Argentina until death threats there forced him onward to Spain, until returning to Uruguay in 1985 upon the collapse of the military dictatorship. He has lived there since, active in journalism, television and politics. He was awarded the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom.

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