Children of the Days

March 11, 2013
In his latest, Uruguayan author Galeano (Memory of Fire) spreads the history of human civilization across a year’s worth of impressionistic and factual daily entries. With each passing day, details of an important event—or one lost to history’s selective memory—illuminate the humanity and barbarism of our species. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, generosity and greed—all are juxtaposed to great effect. An example that sets the conflicted tone for the entire work comes early—on January 12, Galeano writes of the morning in 2007 when famed violinist Joshua Bell played unheeded to hurried masses of subway commuters in Washington, D.C.; the next day, TV evangelist Pat Robertson blames the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti on the Haitian citizens themselves. The only criticism that can be leveled at Galeano’s grand calendar is a familiar one—the days just aren’t long enough. Each takes up less than a page, and while their brevity adds to their impact, it also makes it difficult to slow down to appreciate each snapshot. Perhaps it is a challenge from author to reader to take one day at a time. Whatever Galeano’s intention, this is a heady portrait of the human story rendered in broad, though no less incisive and affecting, strokes. 12 b&w illus. Agent: Susan Bergholz, Susan Bergholz Literary Services.

March 15, 2013
In trademark telegraphic style and with familiar themes, Uruguayan social critic Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, 2009, etc.) serves up a book of days for our time. As readers of the Memory of Fire series and his other books will know, Galeano is nigh-on obsessed with the European conquest of America and the bad behavior that accompanied it, to say nothing of the way in which one American nation in particular has repaid the favor by bullying the rest of the world ever since. While his first entry in this calendar is deceptively gentle ("we ought to acknowledge that time treats us rather kindly"), his second harkens to the year in which that conquest began, 1492, when the Jews and Moors were also expelled from Spain and their holy books destroyed in the belief that "Fire was the only fate for words born in hell." Galeano can be a softie, as when he gurgles over Mozart's effect on newborns (playing his music is "the best way of telling them, 'This is your new home' "), but mostly, his tone is arch and indignant. The author is perhaps overly fond of the one-sentence paragraph ("Every two weeks, a language dies"), but the structure suits the urgency he conveys. As the book progresses, the order becomes ever more apparent, even as the brief essays skip over continents and centuries. Americans will note, but perhaps not appreciate, his fondness for soccer, rebellion of most varieties and sententious declaration ("In the Age of Almighty Computers, drones are the perfect warriors"). A cynic might say that it's more of the same-old preaching to the choir, but Galeano's many readers will surely find this secular calendar appealing.

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May 1, 2013
We are the children of the daysthat is, of time, earth, and the way we transform life into stories. Uruguayan writer Galeano, whose numerous international prizes include the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, takes measure of our collective history, as he did in Mirrors (2009). But here he creates a universal calendar of commemoration that circles the globe, spans centuries, and encompasses war, earthquakes, dictatorships, crimes, heroism, and discoveries. Issac Newton, a man fearful of intimacy, nonetheless discerns the earth's irresistible force of attraction; in a later era, a German hairdresser invents the permanent wave. Geronimo took charge of the Apache resistance in the nineteenth century; in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government killed Osama bin Laden in Operation Geronimo. This date-anchored human chronicle succinctly reflects our species' vast diversity of temperaments, gifts, failings, and afflictions. As profound as Galeano's concerns are, as penetrating as is his knowledge, he is mischievous and agile in each of the vivid 365 sketches, which distill to provocative effect vast reaches of experience and consequence, irony and tragedy, suffering and transcendence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)