Customer Reviews

The Aztec Treasure House: New and Selected Essays

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I first read most of these essays the year I graduated from college. (All but a couple were collected in earlier books which are now quite hard to find.) They are beautifully written, exciting, and fascinating. Connell has an amazing breadth of subjects and communicates complex ideas with ease and clarity. Even years later, I find myself thinking about his essays on the race to the South Pole or near eastern archaeology. In fact, this is that rare book I'd recommend to almost anyone of just about any age. It's full of exciting stories, intelligent analysis, and honest-to-god wit. I'm so glad to see these essays collected in one volume. Hoorah! [Connell's Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge are also fantastic.]

...because I have to admit, in my biz we don't always read for pleasure, or sometimes we forget we can. I have very little to add to the positive editorials on this page. The fascination with the strange and the remarkable, the clashes between worlds, systems of thought, and characters are explored masterfully by Connell. These essays remind me of what I used to read when I first started: the psychological depth of Montaigne, the clarity and mystery of Bruce Chatwin, the wit and erudition of Umberto Eco. Unfortunately this edition lacks any kind of editorial commentary (only the last two essays are dated, to 1996 and 1992; the book does include an extensive bibliography, but no notes or references), so it's hard to judge from this collection how Connell developed over the last decades. On the other hand, what's it matter--these essays are consistently great. Happy reading.

This is a collection of a number of travel essays - travel essays of the historical kind: the search for El Dorado, for the Northwest Passage and the Seven Cities; the voyages of Columbus, Walter Raleigh, the Vikings to North America; and the explorations of Scott, Amundsen, and the number of scientists (Copernicus, Kepler, etc.) who searched the heavens through crude telescopes. There are 20 essays in all, most of substantial length. Connell is a fascinating writer who infuses his narratives with just enough quirky factual information to keep the reader always intrigued; he gives the impression of being endlessly amazed and awed by the subject at hand, which he conveys effortlessly to the reader. The essay on Scott and the explorations of Antarctica is a masterpiece; so too is the one on deciphering ancient tablets. But all of these essays are a delight to read and produce wonder and admiration for those people who risked everything to dream wild dreams, to pursue them, and then to simply marvel at what they found.

These essays are an exquisite treat for the reader of history, both factual and speculative. The Author's as his best when he explores nooks and crannies of history when legend mixes with fact, as in the Vinland essay, on in the essay on the Etruscans. In these cases, the Author is objective as can be, but he reveals his sympathy for the more imaginative theories. .Il loved also his essays on the legends of Priester John, El Dorado and the Seven Cities. How easily is man prey of fancy notions and fanatical beliefs, like in the Innocents crusade! These essays are thoughjt provoking as they are learned.

Connoisseurs of obscure history and fantastic legend will delight in this collection, which gathers together the contents of Connell's twenty-year-old (and long out of print) books A Long Desire and The White Lantern, and adds two more recent pieces. The twenty essays are a mostly entertaining and fascinating bunch, touching upon all manner of historical curiosities. In every case, the topic has been previously dissected with great detail by "professional" historians - witness the 300 or so books that appear in the bibliography. Yet one should be thankful that an armchair historian and accomplished writer such as Connell has distilled many thousands of pages until only the the most potent brew remains to excite the imagination.

Ranging in length from 10-65 pages, the essays delve through the back corridors of history in wide-ranging, chatty fashion. Their topics are generally either quests of a physical or intellectual nature. The former tend to be the more engaging, as they involve feats of derring-do, greed, folly, and old-fashioned adventure. For example, in various essays Connell covers the following: hundreds of years of attempts to locate the Northwest Passage, the search for the passage to India, Norse settlement of Greenland and America, the race for the South Pole, the prodigious wanderlust of 14th-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battutah, the mass hysteria and lunacy of the dual 13th-century Children's Crusades, the futile Spanish quest for El Dorado, the Spanish quest for the mythical Seven Cities, and Mayan gold. The intellectual quests are also generally interesting, but by their very nature more abstract. These include Atlantis, the mythical Christian King Prester John, the search for the "missing link", an overview of medieval alchemy, decoding ancient languages, interpreting the heavens, the origin of the Etruscans, the mysterious cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in New Mexico, and finally, graffiti carved into a monolith in New Mexico. Probably my favorite piece fits into neither category, "Gustav's Dreadnought" describes a 17th-century nautical folly spawned by Sweden's King Gustav.

Connell's relates everything with a natural storyteller's voice. The prose is always lively, however can be choppy at times due to his propensity for short paragraphs. And of course, not every essay will appeal to every readers - I personally skimmed two of the longer ones about linguistics and astrology. In general, the more specific the focus, the stronger the essay. The collection's one significant flaw is the absence of maps. On the whole though, this is a great book to dip into, say one essay a week, allowing the reader to revel in the mysteries and adventure of the past.

A crackling good trove of true tales is what we have here. Connell has a jeweler's eye for interesting details and he's a terrific writer. Add it up and it's safe to say these are among the best history essays ever written, imho.

Evan Connell knows how to capture the reader with an array of fascinating details woven into wonderful journeys that weave
through different corridors of human history.

Take the adventure and read this collection of essays!

This wonderful book flows along like a river. Sometimes it bumps into boulders, swirls in an odd corner, or leaps down a waterfall. Connell throws in extraneous facts, skips from here to there,and gives enjoyable reading. He would be an author of great stature if he could refrain from his heavy-handed pose of jaded cynicism. Yes, we know there are nasty people in the world without being reminded at every possible cue. Yes, we know that many people in the English speaking world are execrable, too, even though we have produced nobody of Hitler's rank: where he uses Dresden to provide an example of an apartment crumbling during WWII, London also provided plenty of firebombed apartments, and they didn't even start the war. And anyway, all that is thoroughly traveled territory, inappropriate for a book that takes us into untraveled lands and unknown people.

These are great stories, told superbly. One thing puzzled me, though. Connell's eloquence failed him on perhaps the greatest journey of all. Compare his telling of the Cabeza de Vaca to the same story in DeVoto's Course of Empire. Strange.

But don't let this get in your way. Read and enjoy!