Travel to South America

Valverde's Gold: In Search of the Last Great Inca Treasure

Format: Hardcover
Author: Mark Honigsbaum
ReleaseDate: 18 August, 2004
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Rating:

Lacklustre - Read the first and last chapters and skip the rest
Whilst treasure hunts are inherently interesting (and this one is the biggest of them all), following Honigsbaum is more often than not utterly boring. This book is pretty disappointing. In each chapter his quest for the lost Incan treasure diverges into a new dead-end avenue, and his research is so hodge-podge that it is difficult to follow.

Much of his prose is boring and ought to have been cut short. For instance, he spends a chapter detailing his study of old Spanish documents in Seville, despite the fact that he finds absolutely nothing of import. Historical research is not exactly something one needs to read about in detail. His prose reads something like, "And suddenly, I put a new search term in the computer! I waited, as the hourglass turned on screen for what seemed an eternity. Then, just as I thought I was about to find the key document, my search came back! 'No Documents Found,' it said. " He might then look over an unrelated document, and spend a page talking about a story that has no bearing on the treasure or anything to do with it; it just seems to fill up space in the book.

Overall, the author seems out to intrigue his audience enough to buy the book, but that's the extent of his effort. It's like a bad movie in which the preview only shows scenes with pretty girls and cars blowing up. Suck the audience in, because once you've got their money, what do you care? As I labored to get through Valverde's Gold, all I could think was, "I know exactly how this ends. . . I mean, if he found the treasure, would he really have written this awful book?".

a bad search by a bad author
i have always loved treasuer hunts but this is just a terrible account of one. this is perhaps the most disappointing book i have read in years. the author lays out the basics about the capture of the inca king and all that, but then it disloves into loose ends. he hunts down various people who have information and maps but he seems to alienate them so quickly that he fails to get any helpful data and most of them will speak to him again. further he goes on a trek with a drunk and comes back more than empty handed. a terrible book and a total waste of time and money. wait for the movie "how not to find a treasure for dummies". dgs.

Thoroughly researched and mostly entertaining....
It's not until the last chapter that the author actually details his own physical search for the fabled treasure in Ecuador of the Incan King Atahualpa. First and foremost, this book is more of a literary and investigative adventure. A treasure that by all accounts over the last 500 years may be the most valuable land cache of gold and other precious objects on earth. It provides interesting and entertaining background on the other treasure hunters and explorers who went before him on the search. This leads the reader through labrynthine twists of misinformation, questionable documents/maps and several "characters" the author encounters who come across as gold-crazed swashbucklers. The book is definitely well-researched, but I expected something more along the lines of an Indiana Jones type of real-life adventure and came away with something more along the lines of a day spent in a musty-smelling library.

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