Reviews

• excellent author

  This book starts out with the legends of the native Americans about where things originated. It's a great bit of ancient history and some of it rather amusing. I have only begun to read the rest of the book, but so far am very impressed by the writer's style. He is very expressive and gives the reader a feel for what the subjects are feeling/thinking.

• Five Stars

  Excellent!

• Galeano is a Genius

  The opening act to a three act play, Genesis speaks of creation stories throughout the world. It is a comfort to know that, even with the immense culture differences, all humans believed in some form of creation.

• A non-history of the new world

  Colorful evocative langauge. Gives you a real sense and flavor of the world at that time. Each of the many short pieces is like a snapshot or window into a particular moment in the unfolding chronology.

• Noble savages for beginners

  This book was written 22 years ago, at the peak of a much needed, multiculturalist, revisionist second look at the human species, which we're moving past now. The deconstruction of history has been achieved and it's time to put it back together in all its complexity. But if you missed a peak into that world, in which natives are all good and invaders/immigrants all savage (save one), with Jesus as their Fuehrer, this is the book. (That's what most of history is, by the way, one people invading another. Even the Spanish were once conquered, enslaved and missionized!) I've read some of Galeano's sources in the original, and his fictionalization [he doesn't claim direct translation] puts the worst possible spin on situations taken creatively out of context. Example: Pope Paul III declared in 1537 that, even though they're not mentioned in the Bible or the writings of the ancients, the Americans were human beings. The reader is supposed to be aghast. But that conversation never even took place among Protestants! Good thinking, Paul III! There's a reason Latin America has all the Indians. The Spaniards often behaved atrociously, but where are the 100,000 victims of the Aztec temple of doom? The wailing of all those children can still be heard in the chronicles. Europe did not conquer Paradise; American natives were and are adults, allying their nations with whomever sought to defeat their enemies. When you paint people as good or bad, all the color is washed out of history, all the humor, the accidental delight, the love stories, the tragic misunderstandings and internecine squabbles - all of who we are. The "story" is excised from "history." The true sorrows of man's universal inhumanity to man ring hollow in Galeano's imaginary world.

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