Genesis

By Eduardo Galeano,

Book cover of Genesis

Book description

Genesis , the first volume in Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, is both a meditation on the clashes between the Old World and the New and, in the author's words, an attempt to rescue the kidnapped memory of all America." It is a fierce, impassioned, and kaleidoscopic historical experience…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Genesis as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

The Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano was by his own admission "a wretched history student," who set out "to rescue the kidnapped memory of all America, and especially of Latin America," from a "History [that] had stopped breathing: betrayed in academic texts, lied about in classrooms, drowned in dates, they had imprisoned her in museums and buried her, with floral wreaths, beneath statuary bronze and monumental marble."

In his Memory of Fire trilogy, Galeano resurrects the continent's real history in more than 1200 staccato images, built around quotations from colonial documents, contemporary press reports, and the like. These "fragments" come together…

From Derek's list on imaginative histories.

The most ambitious counter-history of Latin America! A brilliant way of storytelling. Short historical scenes romp through 400 years. This epic trilogy is a heart-stopping narrative. Galeano begins with the indigenous spirit world that explodes into conflict with the first arrival of Columbus and his mercenaries. In one or two-page vignettes, readers are guided through hearts of darkness and bold resistance. This groundbreaking work stands as an anti-colonial masterpiece. The grand tragedy unfolds with pain and suffering, incredible heroism and hope, irony and outrage. It will mark you…

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