NONFICTION - Aug. 16, 1992

THE HEART OF THE SKY: Travels Among the Maya by Peter Canby (HarperCollins: $25; 368 pp . ) The Chamula of Mexico’s Chiapas highlands are an indigent and angry people often assumed to be “just poor Indians who’d never known how to take care of their land.” The modern stereotype is cruelly inaccurate, however, for the Chamula lived in a fertile valley until the Spanish arrived in the New World, encountered resistance and ultimately exiled the Chamula to the unproductive high country. Peter Canby gives the history of many Maya groups in this travel book, and although his interests are more sociological than political, the Chamulas’ story is just one of many tragedies he describes: perhaps 100,000 people, mostly Maya, killed in Guatemala in the 1980s; ongoing debt slavery in parts of Mexico; the depopulation of Belize in the 16th Century (which, incidentally, made it a haven for pirates). These are interesting accounts, but the pieces don’t come together to make an absorbing book. Canby, wisely, stays off the beaten track--although he goes to Palenque, he skips Chichen Itza and Uxmal--but his writing is ordinary and attempts to cover too much territory.