Sports, Games, and Gambling in the Aztec World

About the Book

Sports, Games, and Gambling in the Aztec World consists of a series of original essays written by Professor Wasserman over a twenty-year period. These essays review and discuss the psychological dynamics involved in the three major Aztec sports and games: patolli (the dice game), tlachtli (the ball game), and Volador (the game of vertigo). In addition, as part of the collection, there is a creative piece showing that poetry, although not considered a game or sport, was viewed by an honored king in the Aztec world—Nezahualcoyotl or Hungry Coyote—as a human gamble with death itself.

About the Author

About the Author Martin Wasserman is a professor emeritus at SUNY Adirondack, a college in the State University of New York system, where he taught for thirty-six years. During his career, he published over thirty journal articles and three books. One of those works, Kafka Kaleidoscope, was chosen as a Best Book by the Small Press Review in 1999. Professor Wasserman’s most recent publications are a translation entitled Listening to the Other: Versions of Yiddish, Vietnamese, and Aztec Poetry and an original piece called Vultures, Hemorrhages, and Zionism: A Sociohistorical Investigation of a Franz Kafka Parable.