Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) is one of Latin America's most admired writers, as well as a distinguished journalist and historian. Winner of the first Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize in 1998, he is the author of Upside Down, the Memory of Fire trilogy (for which he won the 1989 American Book Award), Open Veins of Latin America, and many other works. He lived in Montevideo, Uruguay.

In a series of mock lesson plans and a "program of study" Galeano provides an eloquent, passionate, funny and shocking exposé of First World privileges and assumptions. 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 "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, he writes, one where poverty kills, people are hungry, machines are more precious than humans, and children work from dark to dark. In the North, we are fed on a diet of artificial need and all made the same by things we own; the South is the galley slave enabling our greed.