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About
Eduardo Galeano, author of the incomparable Memory of Fire Trilogy, combines a novelist's intensity, a poet's lyricism, a journalist's fearlessness, and the strong judgments of an engaged historian. Now his talents are richly displayed in Upside Down, an eloquent, passionate, sometimes hilarious exposé of our first-world privileges and assumptions. In a series of lesson plans and a "program of study" about our beleaguered planet, Galeano takes the reader on a wild trip through the global looking glass. From a master class in "The Impunity of Power" to a seminar on "The Sacred Car" -with tips along the way on "How to Resist Useless Vices" and a declaration of "The Right to Rave" -he surveys a world unevenly divided between abundance and deprivation, carnival and torture, power and helplessness. We have accepted a reality we should reject, Galeano teaches us, one where machines are more precious than humans, people are hungry, poverty kills, and children toil from dark to dark.
A work of fire and charm, Upside Down makes us see the world anew and even glimpse how it might be set right.
A work of fire and charm, Upside Down makes us see the world anew and even glimpse how it might be set right.
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Reviews
"Galeano's pages are full of empathy, candor, unsettling connections, and fresh through more than 30 years, affront at the suffering of his country--for Uruguay itself was in exile from its long traditions of tolerance. He writes in defense of his countrymen and others: the embattled Mexican Indians in Chiapas, Brazil's street children, the more than eight million children abandoned across Latin America . . . from the Internet to Interpol, from the vapidity of television to auto-itis, nothing is safe from Galeano's committed deconstructions."
Isabel Fonseca, New York Times Book Review
"Galeano takes us on a dark tour through the rabbit hole at the End of History. Like the revolutionary printmaker Posada, he unmasks the belle epoque of the bourgeoisie as a danse macabre of the masses. No one has focused greater moral clarity on the inhuman conditions and radical inequalities that sustain the mirage of the New Economy."
Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear
"This catalog of crimes and absurdities has both the acidity of Jonathan Swift and his dark humor. Who else can make the skeletons dance the way Galeano does?"
The New Yorker