Conquistador

The story of Hernan Cortes and the sixteenth-century conquest of Mexico by the Spanish is one of the bloodiest in history, with both the Europeans and the Aztecs engaging in extraordinary acts of violence. Buddy Levy comes to this story with a journalist's rigor and a novelist's ear, and his account of the conquest is fair minded and engaging. Patrick Lawlor's narration moves the work along at a good pace, though he sabotages it by affecting a cartoonish accent when reading the words of Cortes and the other Spaniards. Further, his rendering of the name of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitl‡n, makes one wish that audiobook narrators were better coached on the correct pronunciation of foreign words and place names. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine