Amazing journey through pre-Columbian Central America

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	• Aztec Gary Jennings Forge Books, 2006 - 768 pages average customer review:based on 240 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Amazing journey through pre-Columbian Central America

Incredible journey through Central America before and up to the devastation that was the arrival of the Europeans. Gripping story with a lot of action wrapped in insightful historical perspective. Great characters and although the life of the main character may be a little too big to be one person's life the context and the environment through which he takes you is extremely believable and pretty accurate from what I could tell.

A great historical novel that doesn't bog down

I love history with all its lessons and implications, but sadly history books can either be fascinating or terminally dull. "Aztec" by the late Gary Jennings is a great book, exhaustively researched by an author who loved the history and culture of the book's subject, as evidenced by his other similiar novels.
We learn the tale of an Aztec Indian who, because of his literary skills, becomes a historian on his own, and describes his life among a civilization that is at the same time superstitious, bloodthirsty but also capable of great beauty and knowledge. He tells the tale to his conquering Spanish friars and Jennings does not hesitate to bring up the obvious irony of the Spanish Catholic settlers ridiculing the many gods of the Aztec world and its superstitions, meanwhile destroying the pyramids and temples and replacing them with churches full of their own saints and countless rituals of their own, not to mention their own penchant for bloodletting and cruelty.
"Aztec" is sometimes vulgar, sometimes beautiful or funny, and at all times entrancing. History buffs and readers who just like an excellent story should add this book to their libraries at once.

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Simply AMAZING

This is an awesome book. I won't say here what almost everybody before me has already said, just this: This book is a must read for everybody that calls himself a Mexican (like me).
I already knew much of the history, but I have never read it in an objective way.
And for everyone else (not Mexicans) I definitely recommend it, it contains not only very detailed history about the Aztec people but a very good novel within.

lost civilization come alive

I read this excellent novel years ago and still remember its impact on me. I was entranced by Jennings' descriptions of peoples and empires long gone. His device of using a traveling merchant--pocheca--as his primary character was excellent. It gave Jennings the opportunity to take the reader to places and peoples distant from the capital in Tenochtitlan. His description of war, religion and human sacrifice is wonderful and reflects the obvious fact that Jennings carefully researched the subject.

I especially remember the merchant's horror to find that his daughter had, without his knowledge, been offered up to the horrific Flayed God, Xipe Totec. He sees her in the form of a bloody skin worn by a dancing priest. Here I must mention that there are revisionists who deny that these things--wholesale human sacrifice--actually happened in ancient Mexico--that they were inventions of the rapacious Spaniards to justify their conquest. I can remember visiting the National Museum in Mexico City where you can see Aztec ceremonial bowls used to hold human hearts; chacmools used for the same purpose; sacrificial knives; and even an effigy of Xipe Totec wearing a human skin like a garment. Nowhere, however, was there a mention of human sacrifice. Political correctness. Political stupidity.

In writing my own novels, "Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God", on the Conquest of Mexico from the Spanish perspective, I'm delighted to say I was decidedly politically INCORRECT.

Ron Braithwaite

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Good, gory read

You don't have to be a sicko to like this book.

It's a romanticized version of the Aztecs, but the book still has a lot going for it. It's a human universal: sexuality and death cults go hand in hand -- be prepared. The book recreates the worldview of pre-conquistador Mexico City, and then brings in the Spanish. The plot is... good to great. A few loose ends were tied up in just the way you knew they would be, but there are still some surprises.

If you liked Tom Clancy's Without Remorse or Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, you are probably going to like this, too.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Aztec is the extraordinary story of the last and greatest native civilization of North America. Told in the words of one of the most robust and memorable characters in modern fiction, Mixtli-Dark Cloud, Aztec reveals the very depths of Aztec civilization from the peak and feather-banner splendor of the Aztec Capital of Tenochtitlan to the arrival of Hernán Cortás and his conquistadores, and their destruction of the Aztec empire. The story of Mixtli is the story of the Aztecs themselves---a compelling, epic tale of heroic dignity and a colossal civilization?s rise and fall.

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