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

An extraordinary book. One of Oxford University Press' 'Library of Latin America' series, translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane, here is a tome worthy of high 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," Written in the Inquisitor's prisons, this is a topsy-turvy book where Europeans are the barbarians. Refreshing! De Mier was famed in his own time as a scholar and thinker, & indeed these 240 pages unsheathe a remarkable man, revealing with a novelist's succinct eye the true nature of the world and its passing, and our time in it. Impossible to overstate the beauty and severity of a spirituality in high bloom. Recommended.