About
Author: Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay)
Genre: History
Setting
Place: Across the World
Time: Ancient – 2000s
My Rating (see what this means)
My Subjective Rating: 4
My ‘Objective’ Rating: 2.94
Introduction
The subtitle of Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano, summarizes neatly the objective of the book – telling stories of almost everyone.
In six hundred vignettes, most no longer than half a page, the author manages to cover thousands of years of human history – with great insights, deep pathos, and fascinating foods for thought. Despite often being a thoroughly depressing book – for it delves into great details all the tragedies of human history, documents all of humanities failures – wars, genocides, discrimination and what not – the author’s wit and poetry and breadth of insight makes the book a joy to read. And it is pretty informative too.
Review
Given the scope and breadth of the book, even several days after having finished it, I was still struggling with what to write here. I initially thought I will simply make a list of my favourite vignettes – but that seems impractical – given there were so many.
But while capturing the depths of human tradegy – the book also captures humanity marvelousness in its arts and music and photography – and reading several vignettes, were accompained by me googling these pieces of human ingenuity. Some of these are captured below – and that is going to be ths blog. If anything here intrigues you – read the book and you will find many more!
The Failure of My Scoring Logic
Mirrors is a difficult to classify book – it is history, but told as several short stories – with more narrative flair, than expository details. However, its 600 vignettes don’t really fit in any traditional or experimental models of short story collections either. It is as described truly genre-bending.
In my objective framework for scoring books – I used the expository non-fiction framework – but it doesn’t neatly fit for this book. Hence, understandably low objective scores. Key metrics like balance, structure, context setting, sources, etc., which are important elements of a good non-fiction book, remain absent and arguably irrelevant here.
On my subjective score – it is not a 5 only because the book occasionally turns super depressing, and has a lot more focus on Europe and the Americas than my home continent – Asia. But I know that I am going to read again and perhaps again after that.
Picture Credits:
- Cover Picture: As is quite obvious, neither the person in the cover is Vasco Núñez de Balboa, nor the oceans Atlantic or the Pacific. But my trip to Padar Islands in Indonesia – coincided with my reading of this perfect little vignette – and it was too tempting to forgo this opportunity
- Personalities – Socrates, Oduduwa, Cleopatra, Jesus, Columbus, Isabella, Jeferrson, Victoria, Marx, Che, Lenin, Hitler, Gandhi, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Lumumba, Einstein, Josephine Baker, Maradona, Bush
- Cueva Manos
- Rosetta Stone
- Cave paintings Tassili n’Ajjer Mountains
- Hendrickje Stoffels by Rembrandt
- The Scream by Edvard Munch
- Vermeer van Delft
- Joe Rosenthal
- Khaldei Yevgeny
- Tsunami by Hokusai
- Napoleon by Jacques Louis David
- The Throne by Augustin Victor Casasola
- Yalta Conference by Richard Sorno, Robert Hopkins
- Guernica by Pablo Picasso