It would be unfair to review this book as a work of serious scholarship, for it was designed as a decorative picture book, but even so, it cannot be considered successful. The numerous illustrations (line cuts in the margins and halftone and color prints) are frequently pointless, poorly fitted to the format, and poorly reproduced. The color plates are garish and inaccurate, and they reflect no credit on the West German printers. In a book of this nature it may be too much to ask that the illustrations contribute to the text—but surely, then, the text should systematically relate to and supplement the pictures.
It is difficult to understand why McGraw-Hill should release this poor example of the coffee-table genre. In the first chapter alone the reader is subjected to landings by Phoenicians and Semites, irrelevant comparisons with the Persians and Romans, Chanchan the Peruvian Nineveh, and the inevitable return of the white-skinned and bearded Viracochas. Perhaps the book’s difficulties are best illuminated by the following sentence, which contains typographical errors, mistaken terminology, and errors of fact or awkward translation that might have been corrected by any casual student of Peru: “The late Peru scholars R. Larco Hoyle and W. C. Bennett, and more recently Dorothy Menzel, hypothesize an organized empire of Tiahuanican culture with the center (Huari) at Ayacucho in middle Peru that was, to a certain extent, a predecessor of the competing empires of the Chimú and the Inca” (p. 10). Alisa Jaffe’s translation is adequate in the sense that it usually reads smoothly, but one wonders if the numerous passages from old Spanish sources were retranslated directly from the Spanish, or whether they were merely taken second hand from the German edition. Or, for example, could Lieselotte and Theo Engl really have intended to say, of the Pacific coast of Colombia, that, “Negroes are the only people who can tolerate the climate” (p. 95)?
If Twilight of Ancient Peru has a saving feature, it is that its basic story is worth telling and retelling. The authors deal most effectively with the time of Huayna Capac, Huascar, and Atahualpa, but the tale begins in the dimness of mythology and is concluded only with the cruel execution of Túpac Amaru by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo.
There are notes on the text, although they are not easy to use, as well as a separate selected bibliography. The notes on the illustrations are somewhat more complete, and there are also very short and superficial appendices relating to style, symbolism, and chronology.
