Conquistadors, Michael Wood
Conquistadors, Michael Wood
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Conquistadors

Author: Michael Wood

Narrator: John Telfer

Unabridged: 10 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/01/2013

Synopsis

Following in the footsteps of the greatest Spanish adventurers, Michael Wood retraces the path of the conquistadors from Amazonia to Lake Titicaca, and from the deserts of North Mexico to the heights of Machu Picchu. As he travels the same routes as Hern├ín Cort├®s, Francisco, and Gonzalo Pizarro, Wood describes the dramatic events that accompanied the epic sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires. He also follows parts of Orellana's extraordinary voyage of discovery down the Amazon and of Cabeza de Vaca's arduous journey across America to the Pacific. Few stories in history match these conquests for sheer drama, endurance, and distances covered, and Wood's gripping narrative brings them fully to life.Wood reconstructs both sides of the conquest, drawing from sources such as Bernal Diaz's eyewitness account, Cort├®s's own letters, and the Aztec texts recorded not long after the fall of Mexico. Wood's evocative story of his own journey makes a compelling connection with the sixteenth-century world as he relates the present-day customs, rituals, and oral traditions of the people he meets. He offers powerful descriptions of the rivers, mountains, and ruins he encounters on his trip, comparing what he has seen and experienced with the historical record.As well as being one of the pivotal events in history, the Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most cruel and devastating. Wood grapples with the moral legacy of the European invasion and with the implications of an episode in history that swept away civilizations, religions, and ways of life. The stories in Conquistadors are not only of conquest, heroism, and greed but of changes in the way we see the world, history and civilization, justice and human rights.

About Michael Wood

Michael Wood is a historian, filmmaker, and broadcaster who has written several bestselling books and made well over one hundred documentary films which are regularly seen on PBS. Some of these book-and-documentary projects include In Search of the Dark Ages, In Search of the Trojan War, and In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great. A professor of public history at the University of Manchester, he is also a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, the Royal Historical Society, and the Society of Antiquaries. He recently received the British Academy President's Medal for services to history and outreach.

About John Telfer

John Telfer, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is an actor best known for playing the character of Willy Pettit in five seasons of Bergerac. He has appeared many times in various television dramas, while his parallel theatrical career has involved him in leading roles at the Bristol Old Vic, the Royal National Theatre, the Old Vic in London, and many regional theaters. He has made hundreds of radio broadcasts, and he plays the part of Alan, the vicar, in The Archers.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Nicky

I'm pretty willing to pick up any of the books Michael Wood has written. They're obviously more popular history than anything, pitched at BBC documentary level, but that is the level of knowledge I have for a lot of historical subjects. Conquistadors is in the usual format familiar from Wood's book......more

Goodreads review by David

This is a great book if you want to read about how Spain conquered Mexico and Peru with just a few hundred men. It’s an easy read and also contains accounts from those who were there at the time. The author made a BBC series about the Conquistadors which I never saw when it was originally shown. I'm......more

Goodreads review by Joshua

In Conquistadors, as with many of his books, Wood weaves the historical accounts of the protagonists of this period with his own experience retracing their steps. This has the unique quality of adding vivid description of the landscape, corroborating details of the accounts, and showing the degree t......more

Goodreads review by Gilbert

Here’s a book that takes a fairly in depth look at the actions of four conquistadors—invaders Cortez, Pizzaro and another Pizzaro, and shipwrecked De Vaca. The accounts are all fascinating, drawing on both Spanish and native sources. The aspect that impressed me the most was Wood’s attempts to show......more

Quotes

“A handsome, lucidly written narrative of events that were, for the most part, a triumph of greed, brutality, and blood.” Houston Chronicle

“This impressively illustrated companion volume to a [PBS] TV series on the destruction of the Aztec and Inca civilizations and related explorations is necessarily one of high drama and telling contrasts. It is also broad-based and balanced, a powerful corrective to the false glamour so often built around Cortés, Pizarro, and their colleagues in genocide.” ForeWord

“[A] superbly detailed history and travelogue…Telfer delivers all the tricky-to-pronounce Spanish and South and Mesoamerican names and places with admirable ease. The listener is drawn into a world of events that still reverberate five hundred years later.” AudioFile

“The digestible narrative provides a provocative overview of a historical episode that was both magnificent and shameful.” Booklist

“Wood’s personal musings place these sixteenth-century conquests into the context of our own experience.” Barnes & Noble, editorial review

“[An] accessible, literate, and lively book.” Amazon.com, editorial review

“Light but not lightweight, Wood’s companion book is a good stand-alone work and doesn’t need the television show to be enjoyed.” Baton Rouge Advocate

“This is historical narrative of a very high quality. The prose is lucid, the descriptive episodes powerfully drawn. Wood describes fairly and sensitively the vast gulf that separated these Bronze Age [Aztec and Inca] cultures from the Western behemoth that overwhelmed and destroyed them, stressing in particular the near total inability of each society to comprehend the mores and values of the other.” Gene Brucker, professor emeritus of history, University of California, Berkeley

Awards

  • AudioFile Earphones Award
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