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The Last Days of the Incas | 
 enlarge | Author: Kim Macquarrie
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy Used: $9.85
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Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 14545
Media: Paperback
Pages: 522
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0743260503
Dewey Decimal Number: 980
EAN: 9780743260503
ASIN: 0743260503
Publication Date: June 5, 2008
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Product Description
In 1532, the fifty-four-year-old Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro led a force of 167 men, including his four brothers, to the shores of Peru. Unbeknownst to the Spaniards, the Inca rulers of Peru had just fought a bloody civil war in which the emperor Atahualpa had defeated his brother Huascar. Pizarro and his men soon clashed with Atahualpa and a huge force of Inca warriors at the Battle of Cajamarca. Despite being outnumbered by more than two hundred to one, the Spaniards prevailed -- due largely to their horses, their steel armor and swords, and their tactic of surprise. They captured and imprisoned Atahualpa. Although the Inca emperor paid an enormous ransom in gold, the Spaniards executed him anyway. The following year, the Spaniards seized the Inca capital of Cuzco, completing their conquest of the largest native empire the New World has ever known. Peru was now a Spanish colony, and the conquistadors were wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.But the Incas did not submit willingly. A young Inca emperor, the brother of Atahualpa, soon led a massive rebellion against the Spaniards, inflicting heavy casualties and nearly wiping out the conquerors. Eventually, however, Pizarro and his men forced the emperor to abandon the Andes and flee to the Amazon. There, he established a hidden capital, called Vilcabamba. Although the Incas fought a deadly, thirty-six-year-long guerrilla war, the Spanish ultimately captured the last Inca emperor and vanquished the native resistance. Kim MacQuarrie lived in Peru for five years and became fascinated by the Incas and the history of the Spanish conquest. Drawing on both native and Spanish chronicles, he vividly describes the dramatic story of the conquest, with all its savagery and suspense. MacQuarrie also relates the story of the modern search for Vilcabamba, of how Machu Picchu was discovered, and of how a trio of colorful American explorers only recently discovered the lost Inca capital of Vilcabamba, hidden for centuries in the Amazon. This authoritative, exciting history is among the most powerful and important accounts of the culture of the South American Indians and the Spanish Conquest.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...
Captured by History June 19, 2007
Dr. Betsy Hesser (Jackson, Wyoming)
20 out of 23 found this review helpful
I absolutely loved this book. Everyone in my family loved this book. It is a rip-roaring adventure that explains an important piece of South American history in a way that captivates the attention at the same time that it makes that particular period in history understandable. How could a small group of illiterate Spanish explorers change the history of an empire of 10 million people? This book is a real-life example of the ideas proposed in the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Although I visited many of the important sites in Peru in which the story takes place a few years ago, I now want to return in order to see those places again from the vantage point of what I learned in "The Last Stand of the Incas." This book makes history come alive and the lessons contained therein have relevance in today's world.
Dr. Betsy Hesser
I couldn't put it down... July 24, 2007
Matthew Richards (Miami, Florida)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
As an amateur Inca enthusiast planning my first trip to Peru I purchased a copy of "The Last Days of the Incas" after reading a review in the newspaper. I wasn't disappointed. Kim MacQuarrie's prose brings what is one of the most exciting stories that has ever occurred in the Americas to life in vivid and startling detail. Once I began reading the book, I literally was unable to put it down. Not only does "The Last Days of the Incas" bring the conquest to life, but it also includes chapters on the modern discoveries of Inca ruins in Peru, and also explains how Machu Picchu (a must see) fits into the history of the Inca Empire. This book does an amazing job of placing you at the heart of the conquest. Francisco Pizarro and his four brothers come completely to life as do a colorful assortment of other Inca and Spanish characters. You'll feel the sharp wind in the Andes whipping round your legs, the buzz of bullets from harquebusiers whizzing by your ears as you experience the valiant and brave efforts of the rebel Inca emperor, Manco Inca, struggle against all odds to hold onto his empire. If you are going on vacation to Peru or South America, or just want to experience an amazing and epic story first hand, then I can't recommend this book enough. Really extraordinary.
Very highly recommended June 11, 2007
Michael Dolan (Washington, D.C.)
10 out of 14 found this review helpful
"Last Days" is that rare history: a ripping tale told with verve and engagement yet also a satisfyingly analysis of an episode in which the forces of culture and conquest collided with remarkable, some would say execrable, but in the end utterly unavoidable outcome. Kim MacQuarrie draws a reader into the vortex of Spain's overthrow, subversion, and debasement of the Inca Empire -- for good measure, bookending that chronicle with the story of how American adventurers Hiram Bingham and later Gene Savoy and Vincent Lee made stunning finds in Inca archaeology. As a stylist MacQuarrie is culpable for lapses into repetition and the occasional clunker sentence (and woe betide whoever let a misspelling of "illiterate" slip through). But this is mere reviewer's barking; when it comes to delivering the goods, MacQuarrie the caravan master never falters. With telling detail, such as asides on how words we use, like "jerky," came from runasimi, or "people speech" (now Quechua), the tongue that linked the Incas' diverse satrapies, and a crisp account of how a mere 100,000 Inca could rule a empire of 10 million extending across the Andes cordillera (an equation the Spanish conquerors reprised in the face of an even worse ratio, thanks to hot lead, cold steel, and armored cavalry), the author forces the reader, like a lid-locked Alex in "A Clockwork Orange," to behold that transformation's guileful, greed-possessed savagery, a Grand Guignol of slaughter as statecraft, as well as its inevitability. No event in the colonization of the New World so aptly sustains the bill of indictment against the Great Nations of Europe for their sins in that secondhand Eden - like avatars of a certain current-day empire and their dreams of transmitting democracy, the conquistadors liked to pretend that their mission was bringing Christianity to pagan indigenes -- and MacQuarrie, an anthropologist and filmmaker (full disclosure: he and I have a passing acquaintance, courtesy of a series on which we both worked), composes that brief with unblinking precision. He gives us process - the mechanism Spain devised to exploit its holdings (a process that gave rise, justifiably, to the "black legend" that ever since has draped the Spanish role in the Americas like a rancid cloak); the machine the Inca developed to maintain their own enterprise (in lieu of paying taxes, imperial subjects could work - as MacQuarrie slyly notes, the average prelapsarian Inca peasant paid tribute to his government at a rate less than that at which today's Americans pay to theirs), the essential technological gap between defenders and invaders (for all practical purposes, the Inca, were Bronze Age club-wielders going into the paint with Spaniards whose swords, lances, and armor were the 16th century equivalent of Abrams tanks). He gives us people - conquistadors Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, illegitimate sons of Spain's hardscrabble Extremadura region who sought to scrub out the stains of bastardy with gold, silver, and blood; Inca emperor Atahualpa, seemingly born to the purple but in reality scant generations removed from his own ancestors' bloody rise to power, and his inheritors Paullu and Manco Inca, who, at first gulled into thinking the Spanish their benefactors, quickly came to their senses and began what would be a four-decade guerrilla war that ended only when the last emperor, Tupac Amaru, was captured and executed. And MacQuarrie gives us parallelism, that elusive gift available to those who have eyes to see it. With Shakespearean balance, he shows how events brought Pizarro and Almagro to variations on the grief they visited on Atahualpa, foreshadowing the inglorious end accorded Spain's rubicund heyday. It's a fitting irony that, among the cast of parties to the Inca Empire's last days, the name of only one - Tupac (as in Shakur, the West Coast rapper named for rebel emperor Tupac Amaru and immortalized by drive by) enjoys any real currency, while Pizarro and Almagro and even Spain inhabit the dustbin of history. In a just world, "Last Days" would be translated into the Inca lingua franca, recorded for CD, cassette, and podcast and distributed through the Andes, that today's Quechua-speaking millions could hear the details of the history they have lived and converted into folktales. Wouldn't hurt to put it out in Spanish, either - and it goes without saying that the Forty Years' War Spain wound up fighting against rebel Incas stands as a cautionary note for the American adventure in Southwest Asia.
-- Michael Dolan, author "The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal Place"
A rollercoaster read July 18, 2007
S. Walshe (Los Angeles, CA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Before I read this book, my knowledge of the Inca Empire was limited to a vague notion that they once had a great civilization that was quickly destroyed by a small bunch of Spaniards. I had no idea of the blood curdling drama that awaited me. Kim MacQuarrie's book is a riveting, thrill a minute tale written with such a skillful combination of high stakes immediacy and elegant restraint that I couldn't wait to get to the next chapter and on some occasions, (like when Manco Inca first mobilized the Incas into rebellion to name but one example), I had to remind myself to exhale. Right up to the end, I was willing the Incas to prevail, all the while knowing that their days were numbered. The fact that all the issues it so painstakingly and beautifully brings to the surface are scarily relevant to today's world does the book no disservice either. Read it.
Great Narrative But Missing Pieces July 27, 2007
Observer (Boston, MA, USA)
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
As others have noted, this is an extremely well written description of the rise and fall of Francisco Pizarro and his brothers and the fall of the Incas. MacQuarrie's writing is as fast-paced as a well-edited movie, a movie with heroic deeds, terrifying moments, heroes and villains, plot twists and tragedy. I recommend it without reservations.
However, there are a few things that would have helped or that I am still puzzled over. First, more maps and in greater detail to illustrate the various journeys described. Second, more photographs of the existing ruins and the general topography. The Lee drawings are excellent. Third, and more substantively, the disparity in numbers between Pizarro and the Incas was so great that it remains unclear how the Incas were unable to inflict more casualties in what amounts to hand to hand combat. Yes the horses made a difference but counteracting cavalry charges simply requires pikes or means of disabling the horses. Were the Incas really unable to solve this problem? Fourth, Similarly, if the Incas had the military genius needed to conquer so many more populous tribes, how come this genius suddenly disappeared when it came to the Spanish. Fifth, were the Incas really so naive that they believed that the Spaniards would operate differently than they themselves did with conquered people and territory? Sixth, what was it about Inca society that paralized it once the Inca was in the control of the Spanish. Certainly MacQuarrie illustrates the readiness on the Inca's kin to seek to displace him.
Clearly I have more reading to do, but MacQuarrie's book is a great starting place if you want to get hooked on this period of history.
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