It sounds as if Memory of Fire is not a good one to pass over. Looking forward to getting it.

Very nice tribute to an amazing writer. Thank you.

Galeano is on a very short list in my head, now one shorter.

And you ought not miss "Memory of Fire". A truly impressive creative effort, and not bad as History.

“Luckily on the field you can still see, even if only once in a long while, some insolent rascal who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom.”

Eduardo Galeano may have been best-known as a literary giant of the Latin American left, but the Uruguayan writer, who died Monday of cancer at age 74, was also global soccer’s pre-eminent man of letters. His celebrated collection of aphoristic vignettes on the game, “Soccer in Sun and Shadow,” has become an integral part of the canon of soccer — and all sports — writing. His passing has removed a distinctive voice that managed to celebrate the escapism offered by the spectacle of soccer and at the same time demand it be grounded in the social conditions that surround the stadium and held accountable for the incomparable place it has assumed in global culture.

It was a testimony to his craft that Galeano’s writing spoke to the global experience of the football fan while always remaining grounded in a recognizable Latin American literary idiom. A journalist, a historian and an outspoken critic of imperialism and social injustice, Galeano’s writing on soccer invoked a geographically inflected lyricism in which finding poetry in the sport was itself a kind of political act, emphasizing individual subjectivity above the collective order.

European analytical writing about football was born out of the more earnestly empirical social criticism that attended the industrial age — of which the modern game was a byproduct. Latin American writers could talk without irony about the beautiful game partly through intimate knowledge of the ugliness from which it offered a temporary escape. And the idiomatic versions of the game from country to country became a broader expression of identity.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/13/eduardo-galeano-global-soccer-latin-america.html