When you read a wonderful book, you can't stop talking about it, and so this past week I've been going on and on to friends about a terrific story…A Land So Strange is crammed with scholarship; there are 70 pages filled with footnotes and suggestions for "further reading." And yet it reads like the most gruesome pulp magazine story, so full of mishap and mad misadventure that, as I went on and on about it to friends, invariably they'd say, "Wait! Is this fiction or nonfiction?" It's almost too much to be believed…Once you start this book, it's nearly impossible to put it down.
Resendez's brisk historical narrative cries out for novelisation.
Resendez ... shows how Cortez, de Soto and other would-be conquistadors schemed for their kingdoms in the New World like investors jockeying for IPOs.
Resendez tells this gripping story with zeal. It is impossible not to be swept along by his enthusiasm.
Once you start this book, it's nearly impossible to put it down.
The Washington Post Book World
An extraordinary adventure story . (which) offers a very different sort of paradigm for Europe's encounter with the Americas.
[W]ell-informed, well-written, well-researched and well-suited to providing a new perspective on one of the oldest of American stories.
[Resendez's] voice is original, his writing lucid and gripping.
[I]t is Resendez's clever rewriting of his ordeal--as a survivor's tale--that is most memorable.
Resendez's story is so riveting you'll wonder why so many history books ignore it.
In 1528, 300 conquistadores embarked on the ambitious mission of colonizing Florida. They all disappeared. Eight years later, a band of Spanish slave-traders were rounding up their fleeing human cargo in northwest Mexico when they espied a group of men who appeared to be natives approaching them. One was white. Just as astonishingly, a companion of his was African. Who were these strange figures? They, and two others, were the last survivors of the lost expedition. Their march across Florida, their voyage on spindly rafts across the Gulf of Mexico, their captivity in Texas and their trek across the southwest to the Pacific coast form the backbone of Reséndez's riveting account of the epic journey. The author, a history professor at the University of California-Davis, tells the tale from the Spanish, African and Indian points of view: Native Americans were just as amazed by the original visitors as the visitors were by them, and Reséndez focuses on how the interlopers remade themselves as medicine men and made sense of "social worlds other Europeans could not even begin to fathom." Told from an intriguing and original perspective, Reséndez's narrative is a marvelous addition to the corpus of survival and adventure literature. 15 illus, 16 maps. (Nov.)
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Reséndez (history, Univ. of California, Davis) chronicles the adventures of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who, along with three other survivors of the ill-fated Pánfilo de Narváez expedition of exploration, spent over eight years in what is now the American Gulf Coast region and northern Mexico between 1528 and 1536. The author provides excellent background information about the preparations for the expedition, and its progress from Spain to Hispaniola to Cuba and eventually to Florida, where the explorers became separated from their ships and were lost in the wilderness. Reséndez creates a gripping narrative of one of the most amazing survival stories of all time, basing his work upon the geographical descriptions of Native American cultures in Cabeza de Vaca's own writings, published in Spain in 1542. We follow the gradual migration westward of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, first as slaves of various groups of indigenous people and later as respected shamans and healers who eventually encounter Spanish conquistadors in northern Mexico. This excellent account is highly recommended for U.S. and Mexican history collections in academic and large public libraries.
Delightful retelling of the incredible journey of a castaway Spaniard who was in turn enslaved and befriended by Native Americans. Resendez (History/Univ. of California, Davis; A Texas Patriot on Trial in Mexico, 2006, etc.) aims to fill in some gaps in the Narrative published in 1542 by Alvar Nu-ez Cabeza de Vaca, royal treasurer of a New World expedition who vividly recounted his unanticipated eight-year sojourn in the wilderness. Aiming for a river just north of the portion of Mexico where Hernan Cortes was busily plundering the Aztecs, the fleet commanded by Panfilo de Narvaez was carried off course by the Gulf Stream (unknown to contemporary navigators) and landed mistakenly on the west coast of Florida in April of 1528. Half the expedition, including Cabeza de Vaca, took off on foot along the coast to find the legendary Rio de las Palmas, not realizing they were on the wrong side of the Gulf of Mexico. After a series of dispiriting misadventures, they built rafts that washed up on different parts of the Texas shore, where the men either perished or were taken captive. Enslaved for years by an indigenous Texas tribe, Cabeza de Vaca eventually escaped with two other Spaniards and a native Moroccan slave, Estebanico. Knowledge of the land gleaned from living among the Indians helped them survive as they walked all the way to the Pacific coast, and their rudimentary medical skills enabled them to perform what seemed like miracles of healing to admiring Indians along the way. The castaways finally reestablished contact with Europeans in 1536-and their status as healers quickly diminished. Resendez proves a patient storyteller, employing effective prose hand in hand with the tools of ascholar, including many maps, excellent footnotes and a terrific Further Reading section. The experiences of one of the first outsiders to see the American Southwest still prove fresh and pertinent. Agent: Susan Rabiner/Susan Rabiner Literary Agent
"Once you start this book, it's nearly impossible to put it down." —Carolyn See, Washington Post Book World Joe Rogan Entertainment Weekly Financial Times Times Literary Supplement H.W. Brands, author of Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution Times (U.K.) Wall Street Journal The Scotsman Dallas Morning News Miami Herald Texas Monthly Library Journal (starred review) Providence Journal American Way Magazine oint Report. The story that Reséndez (a history professor at the University of California at Davis) tells is woven largely from these two famous accounts, although he interprets them with fresh eyes. He also brings a breadth of knowledge to his story, stopping often for welcome excursions into such subjects as the weather patterns of the period or how one navigates (or in Miruelo's case, fails to navigate) by dead reckoning. The generous elaborations in his endnotes almost form a second narrative." —American Scholar Houston Chronicle Kirkus Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Land So Strange is destined to become the standard work on the extraordinary journey of this courageous explorer." —Brian Fagan, author of The Little Ice Age
