Faces and Masks

Eduardo Galeano

Apr 2014 · Memory of Fire Book 2 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

“A book as fascinating as the history it relates . . . Galeano is a satirist, realist, and historian.” —Los Angeles Times

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.

About the author

Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) was one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers. He was the author of the trilogy Memory of Fire, Open Veins of Latin America, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Days and Nights of Love and War, The Book of Embraces, Walking Words, Voices of Time, Upside Down, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, and Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. Born in Montevideo, he lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for years before returning to Uruguay. His work has inspired popular and classical composers and playwrights from all over the world and has been translated into twenty-eight languages. He was the recipient of many international prizes, including the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the American Book Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize, and the First Distinguished Citizen of the region by the countries of Mercosur.