The Maya of Central America have been called the Greeks of the New World. In the first millennium A.D. they created the most intellectually and artistically advanced civilization of the Americas. In ensuing centuries, as neighbouring empires fell in warfare and the Spanish Invasion swept across their continent, the Maya endured, shaken but never destroyed.

Ronald Wright's journey through time and space takes him to the lands of the ancient Maya, as well as among the five million people who speak Mayan languages and preserve a Mayan identity today. His travels take him to tiny Belize, the jungles and mountains of Guatemala -- bloodstained by a recent civil war -- and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Embracing history, politics, anthropology, and literature, Time among the Maya is both a fascinating travel memoir and the study of a great civilization.

RONALD WRIGHT is an award-winning historian, essayist, and the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction published in sixteen languages and more than forty countries. His 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, was a #1 national bestseller, won the Libris Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year, and was the basis for the Martin Scorsese–produced documentary Surviving Progress. His other bestselling nonfiction books include the BC Book Prize–winning history What Is America?; Stolen Continents, which won the Gordon Montador Award; and Among the Maya. His first novel, A Scientific Romance, won the 1997 David Higham Prize for Fiction and was a Globe and Mail, Sunday Times, and New York Times book of the year. Wright contributes criticism to the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. He lives in British Columbia.

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