THREE CONQUISTADORS

These embellished, encyclopedic accounts do not qualify as supplementary reading for any students of history. They are without any historical perspective, are taken out of the context of history, of the world and of Spain in relation to any other country, or itself. The description of the bestial and brutal struggle of these three ""heroes"" is an account of harrowing cruelty and a lust for gold, as these ""white men"" cut through villages of Indians, leaving behind razed areas, wiping out whole populations in best Hitlerian fashion, offering no justification for their viciousness and dishonesty other than a very feeble claim to converting the defeated Indians to Christianity. If the object of the book is to depict three dishonorable rogues, in the worst colonial tradition, this has a claim for being read in the gory details of battles. A mass of research with no scholarship or historical sense.