Vivid, powerful and absorbing, this is a first-person account of one of the most startling military episodes in history: the overthrow of Montezuma's doomed Aztec Empire by the ruthless Hernan Cortes and his band of adventurers. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, himself a soldier under Cortes, presents a fa[...]

This rugged new translation -- the first entirely new English translation in half a century and the only one based on the most recent critical edition of the Guatemalan MS -- allows Diaz to recount, in his own battle-weary and often cynical voice, the achievements, stratagems, and frequent cruelty o[...]