The Memoirs of Fray Servando Teresa De Mier (Library of Latin America)

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating read!
Review: This is an extraordinary book! One of the Oxford University Press' 'Library of Latin America' series, exquisitely translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane, this is a book worthy of the highest praise. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier y Noriega (Mexico, 1763-1827), persecuted by the Inquisition for thirty years for his challenge to the colonial mentality and his willingness "to play an active role in movements of emancipation," These memoirs were written in the Inquisitor's prisons. It is truly a most extraordinary book, a topsy-turvy book -where Europeans are the "barbarians"! An exalting experience! De Mier was famed in his own time as a scholar and a thinker and indeed, the 240 pages of this most uncommon of books, this rarity, unsheathe the most remarkable figure of a man, and enlighten us, almost with a novelist's succinct eye, about the true nature of the world and its passing, and our time in it. Impossible to overstate the importance of this publication. Simply first-rate!