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About the Book

Throughout his career, Eduardo Galeano has turned our understanding of history and reality on its head. Isabel 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.

Reviews

“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.”

—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

About the Author

Eduardo Galeano's works, which have been translated into 28 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.