Memory of Fire

Latin America, Eduardo Galeano believed, had been robbed twice over: of its gold and its silver, and of its memory. Memory of Fire is his answer – a blazing mosaic of five hundred years weaving together myth, memory, poetry, and storytelling – written to ‘rescue the kidnapped memory of all America’. Vol. 1: Genesis takes us back to the start: to how time, fire, and language began, and what the hummingbird, jaguar, and tortoise meant, until Columbus steps ashore; then follows the wreckage of that mistake: Cortés burns his way into Tenochtitlán, Pizarro garrotes an Inca, and the silver mountain of Potosí devours its miners. Vol. 2: Faces and Masks carries the story through revolutions made and revolutions betrayed – Túpac Amaru and Toussaint L'Ouverture, the slave ships, gold rushes, Bolívar, San Martín, Artigas, and the birth of multiple nations. Vol. 3: Century of the Wind brings the twentieth century with electric light and moving pictures: Zapata and Sandino, Frida Kahlo and Che Guevara, the generals, death squads, and banana barons, completing one of the most original histories ever written.