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Conquistador Conquistador Conquistador (2008)

by Buddy Levy(Favorite Author)

4.08 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0553905260 (ISBN13: 9780553905267)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Bantam

review 1: The genre “narrative nonfiction” has some advantages over the standard dry accounts that litter library shelves. The principal advantage is that they engage the reader in ways that, for example, a 9,000 page tome just can’t. They’re short, focused works meant principally as something a couple steps above infotainment.The disadvantages are obvious: narrative fiction often sacrifices nuance and depth for immediacy. The works can be great introductions to a subject, but not much more.Levy’s Conquistador is narrative nonfiction, with all it’s ups and downs. There’s a questionable sentence at the beginning of a chapter stating that Cortes “could feel his pulse quicken,” when he found out so and so blah blah. The words “furiously” and “furious” are used... more liberally; on several occasions, people are seen “paddling furiously” or “digging furiously” or “paddling furiously” or “paddling furiously.” There’s enough furious paddling in this book to fill a trilogy of poorly written softcore erotica.Yes, that’s a 50 Shades joke. No, I won’t apologize.If you’re in the market for a quick intro to Mexico’s history in general (or the fall of Tenochtitlan in particular), Conquistador is a fine place to start. You’ll groan at the depictions of Aztec warriors as the typical savage other that dominates nearly all modern accounts of everything that ever happened ever ever (think teeming hordes and savage warlords), but you’ll be sucked into the grand drama of a real clash of civilizations. And then you’ll remember the name Samuel P Huntington and you’ll roll your eyes and curse the gods for bringing that poor, ignorant soul back into your consciousness.Then you’ll get hungry and buy a sandwich. That’s my review of Buddy Levy’s book. I give it a Sandwich out of 10.
review 2: When I was in sixth or seventh grade, I did a report on Hernan Cortes and his conquest of Tenochtitlan. Boy, oh boy, was I ever woefully uninformed about how this conquest unfolded! This entire campaign was extraordinarily complex, exceedingly difficult, and much, much larger of an undertaking than I ever imagined. At the time Cortes attacked Tenochtitlan, it was one of the largest, most populous, and most beautiful, organized, and spectacularly engineered cities in the world! Cortes razed the city, destroyed a culture and a religion for the sake of gold, power, land, and Christianity. Levy says in his book that "[e]ven by the most conservative estimates, the battle for the Aztec empire ranks, in terms of human life, as the costliest single battle in history." I found that to be astounding! This was not a case of natives rolling over for a white guy they believed to be a god. It was an apocalypse, and it was a hard fought bloody battle on both sides.This was a challenging book to read. I realize that the human sacrifices done by the Aztecs were crucial to their religion, but that did not make it any easier to read about. It was gruesome, and I could easily see how Cortes would be very eager to put a stop to this. On the flip side, Cortes destroyed an empire, and that destruction was bloody, violent, and sickening. This book was dripping in gore and violence.I frequently found myself lost in Levy 's narrative. He really covered every move of every battle. It got tedious at points. There were a lot of major and minor players in this book, and there were a lot of really long Aztec words with lots of X 's in them and no help with respect to pronunciation. It became difficult to keep track of people, places and events.Ultimately, I came away saddened by the loss of Tenochtitlan. It was a city of marvels and horrors, and I wonder how different North America, let alone Mexico, would have been if this city had been allowed to survive history. less

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