num_pages: 272
description: s/t: Four and a Half Centuries of Conquest &amp; Discovery among the MayaWith a British fondness for the colorful fringes of history &amp; a peculiarly British ability to suggest a whole aura of events outside the actual narrative scope of a book, this traveling journalist of much more than reportorial gifts has written a fascinating, speculative &amp; anecdotal sampler-summary of the history of the Maya. That is, what we know about them, &amp; how we have come to know it, since they so tragically entered our historical record in the era of their own cultural decline. Paradoxically, the further forward we come into the present--the era of discovery &amp; scholarship--the deeper our knowledge penetrates the classic Maya past &amp; the more conjectural it becomes. Adamson, who has a fittingly metaphysical turn of mind for the task as well as an ironic sense of humor, links this paradox nicely to the Mayan obsession with time &amp; makes it the structure of his book. His eccentric, abrupt, tangled &amp; vivid style plunges one straight into the Conquest-era Maya world, which we know from Spanish accounts as well as from the Indian codices: a puritanical, fatalistic &amp; sacramentally bloodthirsty society in which "the word for love was also the word for pain." In spite of a vestigial Empire condescension ("the half-bestial glare of neolithic man," the Indians' "great lack of ambition" &amp; "chronic instability"), Adamson manages to reconstruct with equal empathy the reactions of Maya 1st encountering Europeans, those of the 19th century explorer "overwhelmed by the beauty, the stillness, &amp; the sense of desolation" of the ruins, &amp; the more scholarly excitement of deciphering the glyphs on ancient stelae. But his greatest pleasure (&amp; the reader's) is in character vignettes, especially of those passionate, "dotty" 19th century amateurs in whom "recklessness &amp; great curiosity often go together." His own searching, witty intelligence would have been at home with them.--Kirkus
language: English
title: The Ruins of Time
titlecomplete: The Ruins of Time
ratings_count: 9
publisher: Praeger Publishers (NY)