The Last Days of the Incas
by Kim MacQuarrie
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kim MacQuarrieEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05-29
ISBN: 074326049X
Number of pages: 522
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Book Reviews of The Last Days of the Incas
Book Review: Very highly recommended
Summary: 5 Stars
"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"
Summary of The Last Days of the Incas
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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