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Read my book review of Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano in the June edition of InTheFray Magazine.
Mirrors reaches far beyond any traditional-type history book. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980) might be considered its closest counterpart given Zinn's trademark "reversals of perspective" when retelling the sweep of U.S. history. His motivation to "fashion a new kind of history … different from what [he] learned in college and graduate school" (as Zinn writes in his Afterword) parallels Galeano's determination to liberate the past from its mischaracterizations. Both authors give voice to the oppressed, the poor, the persecuted, and the maligned and expose truths about slavery, colonialism, societal wrongdoing, religion, and warfare. Clearly though, the scope and style of their works diverge. Zinn concentrates on the American story expressed in a chronological, clear-cut narrative, while Galeano pursues the sag a of world civilization with absolute and artistic elegance, thereby making Mirrors a stunning literary achievement and a major work of creative nonfiction.
Galeano appeared on C-SPAN's BookTV in June 2009 to discuss Mirrors. During his interview with John Dinges (The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents, 2004), he explained the thrust of his approach:
"My intention was to write an homage to human diversity without boundaries, without frontiers. [No] frontiers of time or frontiers of the map. No frontiers at all. Freely. It was a mad adventure...
I never know if the result is at the level of the good intentions, but the good intention was to rescue the beauty of the terrestrial rainbow. We are much more than what we are told we are. Official history [has] mutilated our past. Big media is mutilating present history. So, we are much more than what we are tolds. For instance, the invisible, the unknown, the anonymous people who [are] ... making history but don't know that they are doing it: women -- suppressed deleted from official history, just [reduced] to a decorative place; black people; Indians; the South of the World; China; India .... So many colors to be added to our rainbow, which is much more beautiful than the other one in the sky."
If there is any book in recent time that has strived for and attained an affective and unambiguous accounting of our human history, it is Mirrors.
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