Eduardo Galeano's Mirrors is a really great book!

[struggle4progress]

I first read Open Veins of Latin America decades ago -- but (idiot that I am) it never occurred to me to check out anything else he wrote

Bought Mirrors yesterday. It's a treasure chest

[hippywife]

1. I know I could Google this but...

why don't you tell us about the book and what you loved about it? :hi:

[struggle4progress]

2. Mirrors consists of about 600 vignettes from human history, each half a page or a page long.

They are short summary and usually end with a one-sentence twist

Galeano's twists can cut to the core: his discussion, in Open Veins of Latin America, of the structural basis of underdevelopment in the third world was brilliantly summarized in that book by the frightful and paradoxical phrase "The Poverty of Mankind as a Consequence of the Wealth of the Land"

So in Mirrors, this ability to cut with a twist remains: he tells of the chimp that was the first primate in space at the beginning of the US space program - captured in Africa, blasted wired into the sky, monitored, retrieved, then spending the rest of his life caged in a zoo

Some of the early vignettes are mythology. The later are history. They're usually interesting and seem to provide traces of insight into other times and places