A fresh, if challenging, perspective on a neglected historical topic.
The final part of Janssens’ (Maneuver and Battle in the Mexican Revolution: A Revolution in Military Affairs, Volume 2, 2016, etc.) comprehensive and iconoclastically revisionist interpretation of the Mexican Revolutionary War.
As 1914 approached, Mexican President Victoriano Huerta’s tyranny—and the Federal Army that protected it—was in dire condition. Still, the Federalists had a deeply ingrained sense of superiority to the citizen army behind the Constitutionalist uprising. Huerta had no shortage of advantages militarily and economically; his regime was widely acknowledged by the world’s major powers, so the success of the Constitutionalists seemed inexplicable. In this third installment of a panoramic trilogy, Janssens argues that the Federalists, expecting a quick triumph, didn’t consider a grand, unifying strategy necessary, so they never devised one. Also, their rigid hierarchy prevented adequate recruitment of quality soldiers, forcing them to amass an army of “conscripts and criminals.” Furthermore, the officer corps was plagued by corruption, the top leadership lacked real vision, and troop morale was perpetually low. By contrast, the Constitutionalists waged war with enthusiastic volunteers who were committed to their cause in an egalitarian army that issued promotions based on merit. As in the first two volumes, Janssens nearly synoptically assesses the historical record, considering not only tactical models, but also the sociocultural ramifications of the Constitutionalists’ victory. In his view, a newly democratic sense of national pride insulated Mexico from unfortunate experiments in militarism that plagued so much of Latin America in the 20th century. Although the author already made many of his concluding points articulately in preceding volumes, this one is particularly strong and impressively original on the impact of American intervention, particularly regarding seesawing embargoes. Taken as a whole, the author’s contribution to the study of the war—and Mexican history in general—is astonishingly thorough. However, despite its generally straightforward prose, this book and its predecessors would be a poor introduction to the subject for the novice due to its mesmeric detail and argumentative complexity. However, Jannsens’ contribution certainly deserves an audience in the academic community.
A fresh, if challenging, perspective on a neglected historical topic.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9964789-2-2
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Revolution Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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