Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
by Camilla Townsend
***Winner of the 2020 Cundill History Prize***
Recommendations from our site
“It’s a ground-breaking book in many ways. Camilla Townsend has been doing work on this for a while at what you might call a high scholarly level, and this is an attempt to take that learning to a slightly wider audience…She has access to these documents called xiuhpohualli, which she translates as ‘yearly accounts’, but they are the Nahuatl people’s annals and, using these, she concentrates on a period of roughly about a hundred years either side of Hernan Cortes’s arrival. She is very concerned not to portray the Mexica, the Aztecs, as these people who indulge in human sacrifice and all the other things we know from Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. But it does go on and the human sacrifice actually increases with time.” Read more...
The Best History Books of 2020
Paul Lay, Historian
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The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World
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Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
by Camilla Townsend -
Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688
by Clare Jackson -
Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces
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Going to Church in Medieval England
by Nicholas Orme