John O. (buzzby) - , reviewed on 12/27/2008 + 6062 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

The author is a linguist employed by the University of York. He admirably refrains from filling in or fictionalizing the rather sketchy historical knowledge of Lope de Aguirre, but that leaves only about a 100 page historical account of him. So the author intersperses accounts of his 1987 trip through Peru, where the accounts of Aguirre is the sketchiest. The locales where we know the most about Aguirre, when he was leading a revolt in what is now Venezuela, the modern travelogue is sketchy. At one point, the author calls the Herzog movie (Aguirre, Wrath of God) wildly inaccurate, which may be true, since the expedition was led most of the time by a different person, and included at least 1,000 people, including hangers-on. Apparently, no one has much good to say about Aguirre's character.

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