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SEVEN MYTHS OF THE SPANISH CONQUEST

Name: SEVEN MYTHS OF THE SPANISH CONQUEST
Author: Matthew Restall
ISBN: 0-19-516077-0

by Matthew Restall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2003

For specialists, mainly, though useful to those interested in how empires—and myths—are made.

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Provocative if dry essay in New World historiography, gainsaying a large body of received wisdom.

Over the last half-century, many writers on the Spanish conquest of the Americas have confronted such thorny problems as the Black Legend and the demography of the pre-Columbian hemisphere, dispelling once-prevailing notions about, for example, why Coronado found so few Indians on his trip across the Great Plains and why Montezuma’s Mexico fell so quickly to Cortez and company. But many of those notions remain, writes Restall (History/Penn. State Univ.), even in such contemporary texts as the supposedly iconoclastic works of Tzvetan Todorov and Kirkpatrick Sale. Using the word loosely enough to give folklorists fits, Restall brands as “myth” the idea, for instance, that a mere handful of conquistadors took down Mexico and Peru, and the concomitant canard that the Indians thought that the Spanish were strange gods from across the sea. The Spanish were indeed few, he acknowledges, but backed by great numbers of Indian allies and, more to the point, by non-Spanish conquistadors, particularly black Africans like Juan García, who hauled a comfortable amount of gold to Spain from Peru and lived well thereafter. “There was no apotheosis,” he adds, “no ‘belief that the Spaniards are gods,’ and no resulting native paralysis.” Some of these myths, Restall holds, came from the pens of Columbus and certain of his contemporaries, who had an understandable interest in promoting themselves as lone heroes; others came from the likes of Washington Irving, whose romantic views of Columbus the visionary entered the historical record in the 19th century and have been hard to root out ever since. Restall’s alternative history of the Conquest emphasizes the multiethnic nature of the newcomers and the practicality of those who ceded land and wealth to them.

For specialists, mainly, though useful to those interested in how empires—and myths—are made.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-19-516077-0

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003

Categories:

HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Matthew Restall

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ON ELTON JOHN
by Matthew Restall

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WHEN MONTEZUMA MET CORTÉS
by Matthew Restall

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PATPONG SISTERS

AN AMERICAN WOMAN'S VIEW OF THE BANGKOK SEX WORLD

by Cleo Odzer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1994

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An ex-hippie falls into a gap between the personal and the political in this grimly fascinating yet fatally flawed debut. Odzer, a graduate student in anthropology, was onto something when she came up with the idea of chronicling the lives of women working in Bangkok's red-light district. Their strange naãvetÇ set against a background of bars showing live sex acts (and some, like a ``blow job bar'' that Odzer visits, openly offering paid sexual services) is an intriguing subject. Odzer proves herself a good interviewer and a thorough researcher. Her trips to the poor northern Thailand homes of some of her subjects are heartbreaking: With their ``fine'' clothes and liberated attitudes, the sex workers are seen as glamorous heroes. (Odzer quotes an anecdote about a schoolgirl who praised a teacher with the unlikely compliment, ``You look as pretty as a whore today.'') Odzer's examination of the confluence of money and sex is shrewd, but when she herself becomes involved with a tout (pimp) named Jek, her analytical abilities fly out the window. It's hard to keep a straight face while she coos over receiving a ``McDonald's french fry keyring'' as a gift from her paramour and then becomes disillusioned when he gives an identical one to an acquaintance. And when, immediately after they have engaged in unprotected sex, she is shocked to learn that Jek sometimes sleeps with prostitutes, it is hard to know whether to be horrified or stupefied by her. Clear-eyed about the farang (foreign) men who avail themselves of Bangkok's sex trade and the strange relationships they often develop, mistaking bought sex for love, Odzer is blind to the similar, mutual exploitation in her own relationship. Odzer seems to want sisterhood to be powerful—but what she really aspires to are the privileges of farang men. (40 b&w photos, not seen; 1 map, 7 diagrams) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-55970-281-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY

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ON THE REZ

by Ian Frazier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2000

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Humorist and chronicler Frazier (Coyote v. Acme, 1996, etc.) returns to Indian country for an astute, personal, and disarmingly frank assessment of life and conflict among the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Reintroducing a figure from Great Plains (1989)—Le War Lance, with whom the author has been friends for 20 years—Frazier explores his own affinity for the Sioux by relating the curious twists and turns of their friendship. A raconteur of the first rank as well as an alcoholic, Le has roamed from Hollywood to upper Manhattan, but is finally back home on the rez. Since Frazier’s own wanderlust has brought him and his family to Missoula, Montana, he often goes to visit Le. Over time, Le introduces his brother and sisters, uncle and aunt, even the graves of his parents and other brothers, endlessly spinning wild yarns that Frazier reproduces without judgment. Elements of tragedy (the girlfriend of Le’s brother is killed by a drunk driver) mingle with near-misses (a hose breaks at the distributor, enveloping the family in a cloud of propane gas), but all this is the normal state of affairs at Pine Ridge. As Frazier ponders the history of Indian bars locally and nationwide, or considers the treaty violation that allowed the US government to steal the Black Hills from the Sioux, he also finds resilience in the great-granddaughter of medicine man Black Elk, and hope in the remarkable story of SuAnne Big Crow, a teenage basketball hero who reunited her bitterly divided people by her example, and whose spirit still lives even after her death in a car crash in 1992. Frazier’s remarkably thorough and thoroughly eclectic study of one people in one place at a particular moment in time reveals as much about its author as its subject, and as much about “us” as “them.” (Photos, maps, not seen)