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Published May 2009
400 pages
Genre: Essays
Publication Information
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.
"In pithy retellings of creation myths and reflections on history, he uses the past to comment on the present." - Publishers Weekly
"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
"Starred Review. Themes and connecting patterns rise up like waves and carry forward flotillas of essays in this gorgeously fluid and caustic chronicle of the human condition." - Booklist
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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