Award-winning author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh brings an ancient Mesoamerican creation myth to life Long ago, the gods of Mesoamerica set out to create humans. They tried many times during each sun, or age. When all their attempts failed and the gods grew tired, only one did not give up: Quetzalcóatl—the Feathered Serpent. To continue, he first had to retrieve the sacred bones of creation guarded by Mictlantecuhtli, lord of the underworld. Gathering his staff, shield, cloak, and shell ornament for good luck, Feathered Serpent embarked on the dangerous quest to create humankind. Award-winning author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh brings to life the story of Feathered Serpent, one of the most important deities in ancient Mesoamerica. With his instantly recognizable, acclaimed art style and grand storytelling, Tonatiuh recounts a thrilling creation tale of epic proportions.
Narrating Mexico's evolution of fire through five eras--pre-human, pre-Hispanic, colonial, industrializing (1880-1980), and contemporary (1980-2015)--this volume relies on the myth of the "five suns" that the Aztecs used to characterize their history. It completes a North American trilogy of fire histories that also includes the United States and Canada.
Fifth Sun offers a comprehensive history of the Aztecs, spanning the period before conquest to a century after the conquest, based on rarely-used Nahuatl-language sources written by the indigenous people.
A young man seeks vengeance against the man who killed his parents in this action-packed science fiction thriller series opener. It is the distant future. The world known as Virga is a fullerene balloon three thousand kilometers in diameter, filled with air, water, and aimlessly floating chunks of rock. The humans who live in this vast environment must build their own fusion suns and “towns” that are in the shape of enormous wood and rope wheels that are spun for gravity. Young, fit, bitter, and friendless, Hayden Griffin is a very dangerous man. He’s come to the city of Rush in the nation of Slipstream with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for the deaths of his parents six years ago. His target is Admiral Chaison Fanning, head of the fleet of Slipstream, which conquered Hayden’s nation of Aerie years ago. And the fact that Hayden’s spent his adolescence living with pirates doesn’t bode well for Fanning’s chances . . .
Describes daily life in the Aztec world, including coverage of geography, foods, trades, arts, games, wars, political systems, class structure, religious practices, trading networks, writings, architecture and science.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
Five years after attacking the human-colonized worlds of the Spiral Arm, the hydrogues maintain absolute control over stardrive fuel...and their embargo is strangling human civilization. On Earth, mankind suffers from renewed attacks by the hydrogues and decides to use a cybernetic army to fight them. Yet the Terran leaders don't realize that these military robots have already exterminated their own makers - and may soon turn on humanity. Once the rulers of an expanding empire, humans have become the galaxy's most endangered species. But the sudden appearance of incredible new beings will destroy all balances of power. Now for humans and the myriad alien factions in the universe, the real war is about to begin...and genocide may be the result.
Can dreams be portals to different realities? Could they link the world of ancient Mayas to current times? Two women—a Maya priestess and modern spiritual seeker—are drawn together across centuries by Jana’s recurrent dream. Risking everything she holds dear and putting her marriage in jeopardy, Jana is compelled to journey to jungle-shrouded Maya ruins where she encounters mysterious forces linking her to Maya priestess Yalucha, who was mandated centuries before to hide her people’s mystical knowledge from the Conquistadors, to be revealed at a critical time. Jana’s reluctant husband Robert is swept along into unsettling experiences with his own Maya roots. What secret bond weaves their lives together with the ancient Maya through events during the height of Tikal, Uxmal and Chichen Itza? In the countdown to the Maya calendar ending in 2012, Jana is called to re-enact a ritual at Chichen Itza to revive hidden knowledge. Could her choice to fulfill this ancient Maya prophecy make a difference for the world? Jana must rediscover her own Maya powers to contend with dark shamanic forces bent on preventing her mission—and activates forces that can heal or destroy her deepest love.
This work, in 6 volumes, is a compendium of traditional cosmologies worldwide. The material includes the global mythology of creation and destruction, but also comprises information drawn from other areas of traditional knowledge, ritual, iconography, shamanism, costume, and dance. Relying on original sources, universal points of agreement are identified, often on counter-intuitive ideas. These suggest a single template, a blueprint for a universal mythology of origins with local variations. Volume 5 documents a large number of traditions concerning unusual and often undesirable properties and activities of the sun and moon. To name just a few examples, prominent beliefs were that the moon was originally brighter than the sun and that the earth once succumbed to the heat caused by the sun's former proximity, its greater strength, its failure to move or the appearance of multiple luminaries.
