Text 10A1-I

The literary form Eduardo Galeano has created in his many books is unique: descriptive vignettes that might range from a paragraph to a dozen pages and that progress with a powerful hypnotic rhythm. Each is self-contained and neatly tells its story not only by what it says, but, equally powerfully, by what it leaves out — and by its juxtaposition, or syncopation, with its neighbors.

Galeano’s book, “Mirrors,” uses this technique to create nothing less than a capsule history of the human race. In some 600 short entries, he travels from prehistory to the present, from the impressionistic to the brutally, precisely documented. Each entry is an avatar of outrage over the depredations of power against its multifarious victims, those rendered helpless by poverty, religion, race, sexual identity or — as in the vignettes about Galileo and Isaac Babel — the simple accident of being right when the truth defined by the prevailing authority was wrong.

The first dozen or so stories move us from the origin of humanity in desire to a meditation on the likelihood that Adam and Eve were black, an evocation of the mystery of the cave paintings in the Sahara, an explanation of the origin of Indian castes and a tribute to the Rosetta stone. Greek mythology figures centrally in the book, as do the flowering of Moorish civilization in Spain, the Crusades and the Inquisition.

Internet: <www.nytimes.com> (adapted).