Mirrors
Stories of Almost Everyone
By Eduardo Galeano
(Nation Books, Hardcover, 9781568584232, 400pp.)
Publication Date: May 2009
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback
Categories: Essays, World - General
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Throughout his career, Eduardo Galeano has turned our understanding of history and reality on its head. Isabelle Allende said his works “invade the reader’s mind, to persuade him or her to surrender to the charm of his writing and power of his idealism.”
Mirrors, Galeano’s most ambitious project since Memory of Fire, is an unofficial history of the world seen through history’s unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano notes: “Official history has it that Vasco Núñez 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 men’s fears, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes, Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity.
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.
Once exiled for 12 years, the Uruguayan author now spends his days at his hometown cafe, writing about themes that have preoccupied him for a lifetime. His latest book, Mirrors, is an unofficial — and unconventional — history of the past 5,000 years. More at NPR.org
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Stories of Almost Everyone: Galeano regales us with tales from our shared history in an inclusive manner, from cultural creation myths to major historical figures and inventions to significant current events. It is a truism that history is written by the victors; what if, Galeano seems to ask, history were told instead by the vanquished, the oppressed and the downtrodden of all cultures and times?
Stories of Almost Everyone: It's hard to think of another living author who would have the nerve to consider writing a book like Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. But for Uruguay's Eduardo Galeano, this collection of vignettes, covering the breadth of human history, was a natural fit.
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