Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

From the winner of the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, a bitingly funny, kaleidoscopic vision of the first world through the eyes of the third Eduardo Galeano, author of the incomparable Memory of Fire Trilogy, combines a novelist's intensity, a poet's lyricism, a journalist's fearlessness, and the strong judgments of an engaged historian. Now his talents are richly displayed in Upside Down , an eloquent, passionate, sometimes hilarious exposé of our first-world privileges and assumptions. In a series of lesson plans and a "program of study" about our beleaguered planet, Galeano takes the reader on a wild trip through the global looking glass. 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 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, Galeano teaches us, one where machines are more precious than humans, people are hungry, poverty kills, and children toil from dark to dark. A work of fire and charm, Upside Down makes us see the world anew and even glimpse how it might be set right. "Galeano's outrage is tempered by intelligence, an ineradicable sense of humor, and hope." - Los Angeles Times , front page With this near-reverent look at current Latin American culture, Uruguayan Galeano adds to his impressive list of publishing credentials (e.g., the "Memory of Fire" trilogy) and awards (the American Book Award and the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom). He subtitles this lively volume a "primer"Dthat is, a primer for pessimism and doom. Considering life in what he terms the South (for readers, the nations of Latin America), he highlights the hopelessness of countries that are not the United States. Galeano offers realistic perspectives on children, crime, racism and sexism, advertising and consumers, and haves and have-nots in a corporation-dominated world. His writing is entertaining and often humorous, yet it yields considerable insight into the everyday expectations of our neighbors to the south, and the author's conclusions are most troubling. Small inserts within the text illustrate his pointsDthe most telling of which focuses on a young boy consumed with watching television, who, when informed of the death of a favorite aging aunt, asks "Who killed her?" Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries. -DBoyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., AL Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Galeano ( The Memory of Fire Trilogy , etc.) has set to paper an astonishingly straight-faced indictment of yanqui capitalism that-for all its freshness and wit-could well have been freeze-dried at about the time of Che Guevara's assassination.The author views the world as essentially a matter of conflict between North and South, rich and poor, First World and Third World, big business and the small guy, and man against nature. Big business pollutes the Third World, uses their cheap labor, and sells them Big Macs, unleashing its power (and power is everything to Galeano) on the poor and voiceless. Galeano sees the US as heavy-handed and heavily armed-using its might to quell any uprising it doesn't like and to impose any government it prefers. The North he holds responsible for most social injustices-"free trade" being his euphemism for the slave trade. He also believes that whites were responsible for the annihilation of Jews, Gypsies, blacks, and gays during the Holocaust. Hitler, he points out, sterilized Gypsies-not very different, he believes, from the sterilizations performed in America during the 1930s on criminals, blacks, and alcoholics. Yet Americans, he believes, feel inexplicably superior. Blacks have been treated poorly in both the northern and southern hemispheres; dark-skinned black or Indian Brazilians form an underclass, rarely seen in the media or at universities. The author writes of the Argentine death squads, and he sees drug trafficking as a plot of the banks and gun manufacturers: "An illegal industry of death thus serves the legal industry of death." Galeano brings an almost Manichean dualism to his disquisitions on stock markets, capitalism, unemployment, nuclear arms--and much, much more.Old-time agitprop from south of the border -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "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 deconst