White Rock

By Hugh Thomson

More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Dec 30, 2003
• ISBN: 9781468302301

Reviews for White Rock

[pdcread · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hugh Thomson first went to Peruvian Andes at the age of 22. He was seeking a ruin that had been discovered a while ago, before being lost to time again. As a fresh faced youth, he found the Inca people and the places he visited compelling, confusing but most of all intoxicating. Walking in the footsteps of the great explorers, such as Bingham, who discovered Machu Picchu and Chambi a famous South American photographer, he travels across plains, over mountains and hacks through jungles in search of the people of this land. However, this book is more than that; it is a personal journey back through time to see the sights of the ancient civilisation and to learn of how it was destroyed by the brutal Spanish conquistadors.

Drawing on his experience of making documentaries Thomson has woven together the historical account of the Incas along with details of his two expeditions to the South American continent. As he went several times with a substantial gap in between the first and second visits, he has split his account over two sections. In each part, he writes about the people and places, the heart stopping moments when travelling in the mountains and jungles and of life in the towns and villages in Peru. The first trip was with two friends, but later he went alone, employing guides to accompany him as he sought the hidden world of the Inca. Whilst this is good, and I enjoyed it, I didn’t think it was as good as Tequila Oil, his trip to Mexico. Still worth reading though for an insight into the modern lands that sit on so much history.

[theonearmedcrab · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Erudite and entertaining, that is what travel books need to be. “The White Rock” (2001) by Hugh Thomson is exactly that. In 1982, still somewhere in his 20s, Mr. Thomson goes to Peru to re-discover an Inca ruin that was found, then lost again. This he achieves within the first 50 pages, or so, of the book, but luckily for us he spends the rest of his time looking for more, and traveling the old Inca empire. In the process, he comments on his interpretation of Inca ruins, the steep trails, the magnificent views, on the Inca past as it has been pieced together, and about the many adventurers who preceded him, foremost the “discoverer” of Machu Picchu, Hiram Bingham. In the process, he cleverly weaves together the history of the Incas, rise and internal strife, as well as rapid decline after the Spanish invasion. He returns in 1999, to finish where he left off, and pursue his quest for the latest Inca sites, pushed deepest into the jungle, and the ultimate fall of the last Inca. Great book, both before and during a trip to Peru!

[keylawk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The author is a British documentary film-maker/traveler historian. In the 1980s he launched an expedition into the Peruvian cloud forest to find an Inca ruin called Llactapata by the conquistadores, or Chuquipalta by the Inca. He found this profound temple -- the principal mochadero -- and many other ruins, and then researched "what it means". Thompson does not merely describe the world, but explores its totemic uses and meanings. "We are used to the idea that the Incas quite literally worshipped stone, but few question why. "[187] Why did the Inca carve so much rock so well? The abundant and widespread carving of rock huacas were clearly designed for worship--many in shrines or montanas. Thompson visited many lost cities and retraced the paths of the ancients and the conquistadores and traders. This book is not only an adventure travelogue, but also interwoven with cultural history and colorful personal anecdotes. Fluent in Spanish, with an interest in Quechua, and with the vast conspiracy of life in the Andes and the jungles, Thompson provides a cinematic, even eliptically spiritual, narrative. He revisits the earlier expeditions and work of many others -- from the nasty Pizarro brothers and the worse Aguirre, to the scholars such as Hiram Bingham, and the priestly Las Casas, scandal-mongering Calancha, and the documentarians, Dias, and Galeano. He is not familiar with many anthropologists or earlier Franciscans, such as Armentia. We enjoy frequent literary asides cast to Dante, Shakespeare, and even religious and popular icons.I deeply appreciate the informed interconnectedness in time and space which Thompson draws us into: "...the enormous wealth that Potosi created for the Spanish Emperor...fuelled further misery in Europe with the prosecution of Spain's European wars. Potosi is a terrible reminder of how the Dark Ages continued past the Renaissance and of how the Spanish Conquest ended. It was to the sixteenth century what Auschwitz was to the twentieth." [117]He also highlights the new frontiers of exploration in the sciences and biological realms, while noting that the archeology itself is far from having been completed. He concludes: "But the real appeal is that there are clearly still ruins waiting to be found out there: the cloud-forest and the Amazon have by no means given up all their secrets. Whether in Chachapoyas, where new finds are being made on a regular basis, in the more remote areas of the jungle Antisuyo or, just as importantly, in the forgotten recesses of libraries and archives, one thing is almost certain: the twenty-first century will see new discoveries being made, and with those new discoveries will come more knowledge of the Incas and their extraordinary Empire."With Index, maps, chronology, Inca geneology, illustrations, b/w photographs, bibliography, and an interesting "Notes" section. This is a treasury.

[acarritt_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating and entertaining account of the author's travels through Peru, Bolivia and Venezuala in pursuit of the Incas. I particularly liked this book, because it covered not only the Incas, but also dived into more recent periods of Peruvian history and contemporary life. The book has pace, giving enough detail to hold the attention of the interested amateur.

[eilonwy_anne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A well-crafted hybrid of memoir, travel book and history. It begins with Thomson's quixotic decision as a 21-year-old, untrained, to go to Peru and re-find an Inca ruin that had been discovered, then lost again. In the decades since, he's become a more seasoned explorer and a documentary filmmaker, and his love for the mountainous areas of Peru is a constant.Interwoven with his descriptions of the beautiful, punishing terrain and the abandoned complexes of the Inca are anecdotes of the bizarre characters that have explored the area, the relationship between people of the mountains and of the jungle, the demands of outsiders' tourism and spirituality on the Inca's image, and the often forgotten history of the Inca's last stand. The sites he explores are part of their "rump kingdom", the Vilcabamba, from which they held off the Spanish for decades with guerrilla tactics and cagey diplomacy. While unlike the reviewer from The New York Times Book Review, I am content to remain an 'armchair traveler' and leave these treks to Thomson, I am inspired to read further on the fascinating history of the Inca.

[ana_purna_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A supple, idiosyncratic memoir about the author's early forays into the Cordillera Vilcabamba, refuge of the Inca royalty who survived the initial onslaught by the Spanish conquistadors. Thomson is an engaging stylist, as savvy about Inca history and architecture as he is about modern politics, biting flies, and American ex-pats, and his stories of exploring ruins are both erudite and amusing.

[skf_5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Having been to Machu Picchu twice, this book is interesting in a casual way. Hugh Thompson was a university age English self-styled explorer with no experience when he went to Peru and managed to blunder (with a native guide) onto the site of a ruin that had been "lost" for 70 years. In true collegiate fashion, he seemed to have been as interested in how much alcohol they had to drink on their expeditions as in finding ruins, and little desire to actually study them.However, the most intersting part of the book was the theories about why the Incas built Machu Picchu and other sites high in the mountains away from easy access to water and other amenities of the day. Since I get tired of archealolgists saying that everything they find is either religious or sexual or both, his theories were a refreshing change.