Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World [Paperback]

In a series of mock lesson plans and a program of study Galeano provides an eloquent, passionate, funny and shocking expos? of First World privileges and assumptions. 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 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, he writes, one where poverty kills, people are hungry, machines are more precious than humans, and children work from dark to dark. In the North, we are fed on a diet of artificial need and all made the same by things we own; the South is the galley slave enabling our greed.

Eduardo Galeano(1940-2015) is one of Latin America's most admired writers, as well as a distinguished journalist and historian. Winner of the first Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize in 1998, he is the author ofUpside Down,theMemory of Firetrilogy (for which he won the 1989 American Book Award),Open Veins of Latin America, and many other works. He lived in Montevideo, Uruguay.

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 dlĂ&