Reviews for The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination

The average rating for The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-03 00:00:00 Franck Troots Brown makes a fantastic case for why we should study the phenomenology (rather than the history or the contents) of books. He starts by apologizing for the somewhat obscure nature of the term itself, but justifies his use of it, as well as goes on to justify his adoption of/predilection for certain terms (e.g. artifact) and disdain for others (e.g. print culture). In the clarity of his definitions, he wholly justifies making books (rather than printed matter) his true object of study. He goes on to use those books to excellent effect -- considering their outer aspects alongside their interior messages in order to fully illuminate the meaning they held in Early American society. Though topically, Brown's work is about as far afield from mine as possible (religion? ha!), his methodology is one that I hope to emulate. Early on, Brown describes the sort of work he does an attempt to "unstiffen our sense of what a book is, treating it as a good within economies of buying, selling, giving, and receiving; as an object of reverence and medium of performance; and as a physical platform and organizational system for word, sound, and image" (pp.22-23). Though I take slight issue with where this passage goes from here, the quotation aptly describes my own aims for studying contemporary collectors as well as summarizes the contribution Brown successfully makes to the comprehension of books in Early America.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-25 00:00:00 Thomas Kolar I got a good amount of info from this book and was glad I read it, but the setup is a little weird. Some stories are repeated a lot and stories from the time Harriet was a slave are kind of pushed towards the back and glossed over. So, this is mostly from her time of escape, the Underground Railroad and later life. Not that this isn't plenty of material. I guess there is only a certain amount of info out there and that is what the author had to work with. I just didn't understand the repetition--the book could've had about a third edited out. From what I see, there aren't THAT many books about Harriet and I think this may be among the best of the lot.