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Author Eduardo Galeano has discovered the secret to climbing the bestseller charts: Get a notorious foreign dictator to give the U.S. president a copy of your book. (You thought the answer was going to be vampires, didn’t you?) Actually, Galeano was famous—although probably not to Nancy Grace—long before Hugo Chavez gave President Obama a copy of Galeano’s 1971 work The Open Veins of Latin America, which caused it to jump, overnight, from No. 54,295 on the Amazon bestseller list to No. 2. The book he’ll be in town to read from tonight, Mirrors, isn’t about vampires either. It’s a series of historical American narratives, retold from the perspectives of the oppressed: The black slaves who built the White House, the Native Americans who taught the European settlers to farm in exchange for smallpox, et cetera.
GALEANO READS TUESDAY AT 7 P.M. AT POLITICS AND PROSE, 5015 CONNECTICUT AVE. NW. FREE. (202) 364-1919.