What to say about this remarkable yet eccentric book, written in the first person, no less? Leaving aside cameo appearances in the text by Fidel Castro, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a rogue Mossad agent dealing in Mexican antiquities, and the ghost of the brilliant but long-dead anthropologist Robert Barlow, author Arnold Bauer may have written a book about one of the great historical sources produced by the indigenous world of sixteenth-century central Mexico, the so-called Codex Cardona. It is just as likely, however, that he has penned a story about one the great historical hoaxes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, for there is substantial evidence that the Codex Cardona is modern in origin. Most disturbingly, it is not certain that time will tell us which, since it has disappeared, maybe forever.

The Codex Cardona consists of some 427 pages of indigenous pictographs and descriptive text dealing with the Valley of...

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