Ilan Stavans's vast and subtle knowledge deftly emerges in this engrossing collection of essays. Fascinated by the idea of Western civilization as a sequence of innumerable misinterpretations and misrepresentations, Stavans covers in these nineteen pieces a broad range of personal and philosophical topics with the unifying theme being the crossroads where politics and the imagination meet. His engaging and provocative topics include the shaping of Latin America's collective identity, Peru's modern history as a bloody battle between Enlightenment and darkness, critiques of Octavio Paz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his own fate as a Jew in the Southern Hemisphere, and Columbus's afterlife.