Ronald Wright – författare

We get to share in his personal discoveries through the humour and good fellowship of the road, full of entertaining misadventures. But there is never any doubt that there is an ultimate purpose to these journeys: a passionate need to bear witness to the truth about the past, after centuries of persecution by an alien ruling class. So through the dense clouds of historical tragedy, Wright exchavates hope that a revival of pride and dignity in Andean culture is possible.

The Maya of Central America created one of the most dazzling civilizations on this earth, which is often compared to Ancient Greece. The Maya had a delight in creation, expressed in art, architecture, pottery, astronomy, mathematics and mythology, all combined with a deep, metaphysical fascination with time. This civilization seems to have collapsed in the ninth century, some five hundred years before the Spanish conquest of America. Ronald Wright travelled through the old territories of the Maya (the jungles and mountains of Guatemala, Belize and Mexico) to explore the ancient roots of their culture and to map out what has survived. Despite civil wars and centuries of oppression by first an Hispanic, then Mestizo culture, he discovers a region where seven million people still speak Mayan languages and struggle to maintain their resilient, indigenous culture. It is at once a riveting journey, written with wit and wisdom, but also a study of a civilization. It is travel writing at its broadest and its best.

In little more than a century, Fiji islanders have made the transition from cannibalism to Christianity, from colony to flourishing self-government, without losing their own culture. As Ronald Wright observes, societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that did, and often used this fact as an excuse to conquer, kill and enslave. Touring cities bustling with Indian merchants, quiet Fijian villages and taking part in communal ceremonies, he attributes the remarkable independence of Fiji to the fact that the indigenous social structure remains intact and eighty-three per cent of the land remains in local hands. Wright tells their story with wit and evident pleasure.

Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 by driving a whole herd over a cliff had made too much. Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilisations which fell victim to their own success. The twentieth-century´s runaway growth has placed a murderous burden on the planet. A Short History of Progress argues that this modern predicament is as old as civilisation. Only by understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated since the Stone Age can we recognise the inherent dangers, and, with luck, and wisdom, shape its outcome.