13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quality discussion, but not what I expected, July 27, 2010
This review is from: The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012 (Paperback)
I was looking forward to this book just because of the sheer volume of psuedoscience and misinformation out there. Thankfully this book cuts through most of the fluff out there and sets the record straight in a relatively short volume. That being said, I was expecting much more in the way of actual analysis of the Mayan culture.
Aveni is clear and articulate throughout, but I see this book taking a wrong turn in two ways. First, he spends a lot of time discussing end of time, apocalypse, etc myths. This is great background information; a consistency throughout human history of what is essentially human paranoia. As if the human condition has some part in our need to seek doom and gloom in our lives. While this is important to establishing that 2012 paranoia is just another made up event for people to spread fear, it tends to be the driving theme in the novel. From an expert in Mayan astronomy, I would have expected more analysis of the Maya and less of overall human condition themes.
Second, there's an inherent assumption that readers of this book have taken a look at other 2012 writers. The nitty gritty analysis section tended to be more of a refutation of other authors' work. While this is important to show how other authors are liberally interpreting the data, it doesn't do me much good when I haven't been initiated into the world of 2012 paranoia.
Regardless of my nitpickings, I would recommend this book for anyone wanting some factual and social context regarding 2012. However, I really felt like this book is the cliff's notes or layman's version of a much greater work waiting to be written. While reading I really found myself wanting more information, more data, so that I could draw the same conclusions that Aveni does. I wanted to know more about the Mayan calendar, how the 2012 date came about, what the Maya say specifically about this time period, etc. And I suspect that many of my questions would remain unanswered due to a lack of evidence.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Diamond in the rough, March 9, 2010
This review is from: The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012 (Paperback)
Some marketing geniuses at the publishing house have taken the most academically rigorous and open-minded exposition of 2012 and given it the dull title "The End of Time" that is sure to make it blend in perfectly with cash-ins and spinoffs and be thrown into the remainders pile. This book is really about 2012 as a cultural phenomenon, why it's caught on so quickly in our society, and how it links into science. Aveni comes off as an extremely thoughtful person who has produced a real labor of love. He seeks both to put the research of John Major Jenkins (
The 2012 Story) into the context of more traditional Maya studies, as well as understand why Jenkins is so intent on discovering a Maya basis for cosmological awareness. You'll learn how little we know about the Maya and why they fascinate us.
Great book, look past the cover and find out the science for yourself.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely Poor Research from a Trusted Scholar, March 14, 2011
This review is from: The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012 (Paperback)
I will hope to be clear in this review as to why I believe that Aveni's book deserves such a poor rating. Since it is published by a University Press, I am judging it by the criteria to which a peer-reviewed manuscript, such as Aveni's should adhere. One reason that such a poorly researched book made it through the peer-review process is that there are so few peers who are qualified to judge the research. The 2012 phenomenon has not received an abundance of academic attention and despite the three years that Aveni says he spent writing the book, he appears to have spent very little time of it doing any actual research (not surprising considering his main research correspondent appears to be a high school student). The bulk of the book could essentially be written from Aveni's head and he doesn't ever seem to check his sources very closely (or at all). So, who am I and why should you care what I say? I certainly don't have the accolades attached to my name that Aveni does, but I have been studying the 2012 phenomenon from within academia for several years. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the topic and have presented to major professional academic organizations on the subject) and am about to start a Masters thesis on it.
Obviously, I can't point out all of the flaws in Aveni's research here (but perhaps can elaborate more if questioned in the "comments" section of the review. But, let me at least point out a few which can be fairly easily checked on, just to give you an idea of the sloppiness of Aveni's research. I completely agree with one earlier reviewer who noted how very little time Aveni actually devotes to the 2012 phenomenon itself.
1) In the one small paragraph of the book that Aveni talks about Terence McKenna, one of the very important figures in the development of 2012, Aveni gets essentially every single piece of information wrong (which is significant given that it is the only discussion of McKenna in the whole book. He says that McKenna's book 'The Invisible Landscape' was a "pamphlet" that was published in "1971." It was actually a full book (larger than Aveni's little text) that was published in 1975, significantly the same year as Jose Arguelles published 'The Transformative Vision' and Frank Waters published 'Mexico Mystique' (these 3 1975 book are essentially the impetus for the 2012 phenomenon to come). In relation to this, Aveni says that "maybe" Waters got his Dec. 24, 2011 date for the end of the Long Count from Michael Coe's 1966 book 'The Maya.' If Aveni had even bothered to check 'Mexico Mystique' he would have easily seen that this is definitely where Waters got the date from. In addition to this Aveni wrongly describes the substance the McKenna's were using, suggesting that they "tripped on sacred plants related to natural secretions of the pineal gland especially pronounced in advanced meditators--like Buddhist monks." This mistake is particularly egregious because not only does it mistake the substance they were primarily using (Aveni implies DMT; they were using psilocybin mushrooms), it perpetuates a false, 'new age' assumption about the production of DMT in the pineal gland, in the first place--which comes from Rick Strassman's book 'DMT the Spirit Molecule', in which Strassman says that there is no empirical data to support his claim. And, it also creates a false scientific study which correlates production of DMT with meditating--which, again, doesn't exist. This is unacceptable for a University Press publication!
2) Continuing on the track of failing to simply check your sources, Aveni mentions the thesis of the 1969 book 'Hamlet's Mill,' and goes on to speculate several authors who Aveni bets had a dog-eared copy of the book next to them as they wrote. In each case, Aveni would have merely had to have actually read or checked the bibliographies of the books to note that each of them specifically discuss and cite 'Hamlet's Mill.'
3) He relies heavily on personal anecdotes that are supposed to support much larger trends (a big no-no, known as an availability heuristic) and tends to use things like "I asked my friends" as evidence to support himself. This tends to be most of the extent that Aveni is willing to research. He'll look up names of books but not read them or he'll just cherry-pick from them.
I don't want to make this review too large, and am happy to continue discussion in the "comments" section. So, I'll just close by saying that Aveni's last 2 chapters are perhaps the most useful and well-done (though there are lots of problems in them, too). I would recommend that those looking for a clearer and fuller explanation of what we can say about the Maya side of 2012 from a well-regarded Maya scholar should look at Mark Van Stone's '2012: Science & Prophecy of the Ancient Maya' or find Robert Sitler's 2006 article 'The 2012 Phenomenon: A New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar.' These are limited, in that they are focused on the Maya side of 2012 and not necessarily the historical and cultural milieu that gave way to the phenomenon. Unfortunately, I myself, don't have anything published yet, though I am working on some articles. A chapter by John Hoopes in the soon to be published '2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse' is perhaps the best that is currently available in published form on that history in addition to the '2012 Phenomenon' and 'Mayanism' Wikipedia pages. Sorry Anthony, you dropped the ball this time and when I e-mailed you to try and discuss these issues, you decided that it wasn't worthy your time to discuss them. We'll hope for better scholarship on the topic in the future.
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