For centuries, Europe's imperial powers brutally exploited the peoples and resources of the New World. While soldiers of fortune marched across continents in search of El Dorado, white settlers established plantations and trading posts along the coasts, altering the land and bringing disease and slavery with them. In the midst of a bloody collision of civilizations, the West has birthed new societies out of the old. In the second book of his Memory of Fire trilogy, Eduardo Galeano forges a new understanding of the Americas, history retold from a diverse collection of viewpoints. Spanning the end of empire and the age of revolutions, Faces and Masks brilliantly collects the strands of the past into an iridescent work of literature.
"[Galeano's] works invent genre by smashing categories and joining fragments to yield a 'voice of voices.'... Memory of Fire is devastating, triumphant... sure to scorch the sensibility of English-language readers."
The New York Times Book Review
"From pre-Columbian creation myths and the first European voyages of discovery and conquest to the Age of Reagan, here is 'nothing less than a unified history of the Western Hemisphere... recounted in vivid prose.'"
The New Yorker
"A book as fascinating as the history it relates... Galeano is a satirist, realist, and historian."
