Buddy Levy has put together a very readable history of Hernan Cortes and his battles and maneuvers with Montezuma, the Aztec Empire, and other Central American tribes.\u00a0 It was a great beginning as I begin looking at Central and South America’s history.<\/p>\n
Levy’s not the most inspirational writer, nor the deepest and most insightful researcher.\u00a0 But he does know a great story when he hears it and tells it with clarity and alacrity.\u00a0 He gets out of the way of history and sprays his spotlights on it in a remarkably even-handed way.<\/p>\n
And it’s a crazy story from a modern perspective.\u00a0 Tribal leaders bring a fantastic mix of motivations.\u00a0 Sometimes they are modern and conventionally tactical.\u00a0 Sometimes they make decisions that seem unfathomable because they have very different values.\u00a0 For example, those shiny yellow rocks are interesting and fun to make jewelry out of, but so are tropical bird feathers.\u00a0 Watching one side wheedle gold locations from the other who’s happy to point out feathers at the same level is fun.\u00a0 There are more interesting ideological collisions, too.\u00a0 The story doesn’t need much help.<\/p>\n
A great introduction to the region and politics.\u00a0 Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Buddy Levy has put together a very readable history of Hernan Cortes and his battles and maneuvers with Montezuma, the Aztec Empire, and other Central American tribes.\u00a0 It was a great beginning as I begin looking at Central and South America’s history. Levy’s not the most inspirational writer, nor the deepest and most insightful researcher.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2677,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676\/revisions\/2677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}