Kim MacQuarrie
Kim MacQuarrie is an award-winning author, a documentary filmmaker, and an anthropologist. He’s won multiple national Emmy awards for documentary films made in such disparate regions as Siberia, Papua New Guinea, and Peru. MacQuarrie is the author of four books on Peru and lived in that country for five years, exploring many of its hidden regions. During that time, MacQuarrie lived with a recently-contacted tribe of indigenous Amazonians, called the Yora. It was MacQuarrie’s experience filming a nearby group of indigenous people, whose ancestors still remembered their contacts with the Inca Empire, that ultimately led him to investigate and then to write his book, "The Last Days of the Incas". The book was selected as a "notable book" by the Kiriyama Prize Committee in 2008 and as an "Outstanding Title" by CHOICE (Current Reviews for Academic Libraries). It is currently being made into a 13-part dramatic series by the FX Channel has been published in eight languages.
MacQuarrie's latest book, "Life and Death in the Andes: On the Trail of Bandits, Heroes, and Revolutionaries," is due out on Dec 1, 2015 with Simon & Schuster. In his latest book, the author travels from Colombia 4,500 miles down the length of the Andes to the tip of Patagonia while investigating such disparate characters as Pablo Escobar, Che Guevara, Charles Darwin, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Thor Heyerdahl (of Kon Tiki fame), and even an Incan "Ice Maiden," sacrificed more than 500 years ago on top of a 20,000 foot volcano, but still perfectly preserved.
“In a sense, New World conquest was about men seeking a way around one of life's basic rules - that human beings have to work for a living, just like the rest of the animal world. In Peru, as elsewhere in the Americas, Spaniards were not looking for fertile land that they could farm, they were looking for the cessation of their own need to perform manual labor. To do so, they needed to find large enough groups of people they could force to carry out all the laborious tasks necessary to provide them with the essentials of life: food, shelter, clothing, and, ideally, liquid wealth. Conquest, then, had little to do with adventure, but rather had everything to do with groups of men willing to do just about anything in order to avoid working for a living. Stripped down to its barest bones, the conquest of Peru was all about finding a comfortable retirement.”