Mirrors
Stories of Almost Everyone
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An ambitious and stylish history of human civilization told through hundreds of unheard and forgotten voices, by the acclaimed author of The Open Veins of Latin America
“Nothing less than a capsule history of the human race....Brutally, precisely documented.” —New York Times Book Review
The old adage says that history is written by the victors. Mirrors is an unofficial history of the world seen through history's unseen, unheard, and forgotten. Told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes, Galeano seamlessly moves from prehistory to the present, tracing how power, conflict, and connection have always been at the heart of human civilization. Readers will encounter foundational artists, writers, gods, and visionaries, whose lives span from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York, including the black slaves who built the White House and the many women erased by men's fears. A masterful blend of the poetic and polemic, Mirrors is both a reckoning with, and celebration of humanity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The acclaimed Uruguayan writer Galeano offers another striking but hard to classify work except in relation to his own oeuvre: this book being something like a companion piece to Book of Embraces or his three-volume Memory of Fire. In pithy retellings of creation myths and reflections on history, he uses the past to comment on the present: juxtaposing the origin of the Hindu caste system and the "untouchable" class, whose members were responsible for cleaning up the wreckage of the 2004 tsunami, revealing how the casualties of the invasion of Iraq were not only human but memory itself, embodied by the destruction of priceless artifacts from the birthplace of writing. These vignettes embrace the exalted and the humble, and consistently privilege the narratives of the dispossessed indigenous people, women and accounts from the global south. Across disparate civilizations and centuries but always with an unflinching eye (and irony) trained on the present Galeano's stories register the imaginations of our mythmaking species, the elaborate gestures of (gendered) forms of power and the spirit of rebellion and resilience that fires the underdog masses.
