The Coin Is Still in the Air
Aztecs and How Little It Takes to End a Civilization
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The Coin Is Still in the Air
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Narrated by:
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Jack Jackson
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By:
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Peter Kriger
When Hernan Cortes brought down an empire of millions with a few hundred men, he let a secret out of the bag that we have been trying to forget ever since. A civilization is astonishingly easy to knock over. And almost nobody has to die for it to happen.
Peter Kriger takes up mischievous satire Anti-Columbus, the one in which the Aztecs sail east and discover Europe, and chases the joke all the way to its unsettling, oddly liberating end. His argument is simple and hard to unhear: a civilization is a shop window. Bright, elaborate, lit up, facing the street, with a plain storeroom of old human habits behind it that we never actually threw away. Wars and floods and blackouts smash the glass all the time. The window is fragile. The people behind it are not.
Fast, funny, and quietly profound, this is a book about the difference between the tinsel and the house you actually live in, and about why bombed back to the Stone Age is a threat that forgot its own punchline. The species is nearly unkillable. Your civilization is disposable set-dressing. And someday, inevitably, someone will apologize for erasing us, exactly as we now apologize for the ones we erased.
©2026 Peter Kriger (P)2026 Peter Kriger