Customer Reviews

Mesoamerican Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs of Mexico and Central America

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Read and Gonzalez have a lot of informative things to say about legends in Central America and its mixing with Christianity. They discuss important issues like the passing of time that can alter people's beliefs. The range of topics is extensive, and they handle them with a special talent. This is an important work with deep content but it is reader-friendly. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Aztec and Maya.

Quite simply wonderful. I used this book to teach a course on Mesoamerica and found it accessible, informative, and the right balance between scholarly and engaging. Coffee table books tend to be overly vague and sweeping in their generalizations, recounting the same myths in a monolithic manner, without a sense of the changing nature of mythology and the present uses of them. Gonzalez provides excellent synthetic treatments of the role of mythology in Mesoamerican society as well as thorough thematic coverage of their gods and mythic stories. I highly recommend it.

As an amateur archeologist I have interest in the ancient Maya, but this book let me down. Miller did a much better job with "An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya" (which is cheaper). Many of the illustrations were poorly composed. On a positive note, it had some interesting syntheses.