The central objective of Galeano's career has been to make serious material as widely and deeply accessible as possible. He broke the generic mould to that end, with success. Sadly, his latest book, Children of the Days, is a dumbed-down travesty that perfects the most dubious tendencies of the earlier work without preserving any of its considerable qualities. His vignettes are now merely anecdotes just a few sentences long, plucked whimsically from world history, ancient to modern, with no organising principle. There is an entry for each day of the year: sentimental homages to things Galeano likes (animals, athletes, martyrs, workers of the world, feminists, local craftsmanship, homeopathic remedies, etc); indictments of things he hates (the US, people from the US, war, accredited experts, men, etc), where moral outrage has been replaced by ideological sarcasm. The only subject in the entire book towards which Galeano seems ambivalent is the life of Kim Il-sung. It claims to be a kind of alternative history for the underdog, but contains nothing much below the surface of the mainstream, and no detail. Footnotes, bibliography — all out the window. Certain pages exhibit some half-hearted trappings of prose-poetry. It's the work of a writer no longer seeking to inform, but only to affirm.