Overview

Throughout his career, Eduardo Galeano has turned our understanding of history and reality on its head. Isabelle Allende said his works invade the readers mind, to persuade him or her to surrender to the charm of his writing and power of his idealism. Mirrors, Galeanos most ambitious project since Memory of Fire, is an unofficial history of the world seen through historys unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano notes: Official history has it that Vasco Nez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, the two oceans at once. Were the people who lived there blind?? Recalling the lives of artists, writers, gods, and visionaries, from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York, of the black slaves who built the White House and the women erased by mens fears, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes, Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity.

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9781568584232

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Reviews

From the noted Uruguayan author, a broad, global, sometimes glancing look at all the ways humans do wrong.Galeano (Voices of Time<\i>, 2006, etc.) practically holds a patent on the telling of history via feuilletonistic vignettes, most running just a few hundred words. In this latest variation on the theme he established a quarter-century ago with his Memory of Fire trilogy, Galeano relates some 600 tales, ranging from the protohominid origins of humankind to the sad realization that the 21st century is likely to be no different than its predecessor, born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood. In between is a whirlwind of emperors, pharaohs, soldiers, explorers, saints and sinners. Galeano also develops a few anticapitalist, universalist themes that are sometimes much too obvious - racism is bad; why is Balboa credited as the first man to see two oceans at once when surely some Panamanian Indian beat him to it; etc. - but most of which bear airing nonetheless. In the latter regard, he hits his stride with a sequence of tales on the various ways in which the Devil has been depicted over time: as Muslim ( a great army of demons that grew larger with every blow of the lance, sword, and harquebus ), Jewish, black, female, poor, foreign, gay, Gypsy and/or Indian. Galeano's miniature essays are a hit-or-miss affair. When they hit, they make neat historical connections. When they miss, they sound familiar and tired, as when he writes, In our days, George W. Bush, perhaps believing that writing was invented in Texas, launched with joyful impunity a war to exterminate Iraq. Galeano's admirers will be content with this more-of-the-same approach to universal history; newbies may find it gimmicky. Either way, this new installment is worth a look. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Eduardo Galeano's works, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages, include Memory of Fire (three volumes); Open Veins of Latin America; Soccer in Sun and Shadow; Days and Nights of Love and War; The Book of Embraces; We Say No; Walking Words; Upside Down; and Voices of Time. Born in Montevideo, he lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for years before returning to Uruguay. He was the recipient of the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom and the front-runner for Spain's esteemed Cervantes award.

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