Sons of the Shaking Earth - Phoenix Books | Historical Fiction Novel | Perfect for Book Clubs & History Enthusiasts

Sons of the Shaking Earth is simply one of the best summaries of the Mexican experience that I have read. It synthesizes the last fifteen hundred years of Mexican cultural and ethnological history better than any other volume of which I am aware. As a teacher with some forty years experience I have returned again and again to Eric Wolf's razor sharp insights on the Mexican experience and never, ever, been disappointed. I lived a long portion of my youth in Mexico, but it wasn't until reading Wolf's analyses of the Mexican (especially mestizo) mind that I felt as though I had come to grips with the fundamental realities of the place and of its people. I ordered this book as a gift to my daughter, an art historian and a professor specializing in things Mexican. I know better than to think I will be able to keep myself from dog earing chapters to which she must pay special attention and underlinging text that I have found particularly powerful. Eric Wolf has truly captured the essence of the rise of the Mexican pre-columbian societies, the conquest, the colonial era, the separation of Mexico and Spain, and the rise of the mestizo groups to power. No one who would know the Mexican people will want to miss this writing. Wolf goes out on an intellectual limb from time to time. Perhaps in a few cases he extrapolates more than is academically wise. But in committing these minor sins he stimulates thinking, provokes discussion, pushes back frontiers of ignorance, and makes us reconsider comfortable 'realities.' This work is dated, yes. But there is a reason it is still out there, still around, still available.