Restall v. Conrad & Demarest

Let's get the easiest similarity about Restall and Conrad & Demarest out of the way:  both deal with the Aztec and Inca empires in some way or another.  Restall's book is more about what happened during the Spanish conquest while Conrad & Demarest also look at the histories of these people before the Spanish arrived. 

Both works focus on debunking the myth that the Spanish came in and destroyed the mighty empires of the Aztec and Inca, but both look at it from different perspectives.  Restall focuses more on the Spanish perspective on the conquest and points out that the conquest did not happen as quickly as we are led to believe.  The Spanish conquistadors made it sound like that to prove to the Spanish monarchy that progress was being made.  Conrad & Demarest focus more on the perspective of the natives and show that the religious practices of the Aztec and Inca people, human sacrifice and mummy worship, had already started taking their toll and were already causing a decline in these empires that were barely a century old to begin with. 

The evidence used in both works is very different.  Restall's work focuses on debunking popular myths about the Spanish conquest, so he gives the reader the facts from credible sources.  Conrad & Demarest are dealing with a subject that has very few reliable primary sources about it, that being what the Aztec and Inca empires were like before the Spanish arrived.  Because of this, Conrad & Demarest must rely on hypotheses about cultural evolution and they go into great detail about the different theories out there, such as the difference between etic and emic.  The difference in evidence gives each work a very different tone and thus makes one (Restall) a more popular read and the other (Conrad & Demarest) more of a read for history students and professional historians.