Review

I really wanted to like this book, because I was so impressed by Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. But Genesis is exactly the kind of book that I find really annoying. It’s intended as a kind of mosaic of the history of the first 200 years of European conquest of the Americas, so it consists of roughly one page vignettes: various native American creation myths and other stories, brief episodes in the lives of the conquerors, excerpts from letters, and on and on.

I just can’t get interested in a book structured this way. Though I admire the vast amount of research that Galeano had to have done to create this book, it just doesn’t flow, and I was never able to get interested in it. I wound up merely skimming the last 2/3 of the book.

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