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Loading... The White Rockby Hugh Thomson
A fascinating and entertaining account of the author's travels through Peru, Bolivia and Venezuala in pursuit of the Incas. I particularly liked this book, because it covered not only the Incas, but also dived into more recent periods of Peruvian history and contemporary life. The book has pace, giving enough detail to hold the attention of the interested amateur. (  ) acarritt | Dec 31, 2012 |  A well-crafted hybrid of memoir, travel book and history. It begins with Thomson's quixotic decision as a 21-year-old, untrained, to go to Peru and re-find an Inca ruin that had been discovered, then lost again. In the decades since, he's become a more seasoned explorer and a documentary filmmaker, and his love for the mountainous areas of Peru is a constant. Interwoven with his descriptions of the beautiful, punishing terrain and the abandoned complexes of the Inca are anecdotes of the bizarre characters that have explored the area, the relationship between people of the mountains and of the jungle, the demands of outsiders' tourism and spirituality on the Inca's image, and the often forgotten history of the Inca's last stand. The sites he explores are part of their "rump kingdom", the Vilcabamba, from which they held off the Spanish for decades with guerrilla tactics and cagey diplomacy. While unlike the reviewer from The New York Times Book Review, I am content to remain an 'armchair traveler' and leave these treks to Thomson, I am inspired to read further on the fascinating history of the Inca. ( ) eilonwy_anne | Oct 7, 2008 | A supple, idiosyncratic memoir about the author's early forays into the Cordillera Vilcabamba, refuge of the Inca royalty who survived the initial onslaught by the Spanish conquistadors. Thomson is an engaging stylist, as savvy about Inca history and architecture as he is about modern politics, biting flies, and American ex-pats, and his stories of exploring ruins are both erudite and amusing. ( ) ana_purna | Apr 14, 2008 | Having been to Machu Picchu twice, this book is interesting in a casual way. Hugh Thompson was a university age English self-styled explorer with no experience when he went to Peru and managed to blunder (with a native guide) onto the site of a ruin that had been "lost" for 70 years. In true collegiate fashion, he seemed to have been as interested in how much alcohol they had to drink on their expeditions as in finding ruins, and little desire to actually study them. However, the most intersting part of the book was the theories about why the Incas built Machu Picchu and other sites high in the mountains away from easy access to water and other amenities of the day. Since I get tired of archealolgists saying that everything they find is either religious or sexual or both, his theories were a refreshing change. (  ) skf | Apr 28, 2007 | no reviews | add a review
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