The US went to war against Mexico in 1846 for territory pure and simple. But why, asks Henderson (History/Auburn Univ.), did Mexico go to war against the US?
The answers are suggestive—and valuable, inasmuch as the great majority of books on that war have not bothered to ask how the Mexicans felt about the enterprise. Henderson looks at Mexico’s economic and social conditions: Independent of Spain 45 years after the US declared independence from England, the nation inherited a wholly different approach to the law, the market and daily life from that of its northern neighbor, in particular the belief in mercantilism, a strongly planned central economy that specifically favored the rich. When Santa Anna took his troops to Texas to suppress the rebellion of a decade earlier, he had to pay for them out of pocket, since the federal treasury was all but bankrupt; yet, of course, his position allowed him to become a millionaire many times over, even by modern standards. Mexico’s economic weakness, writes Henderson, was matched by difficult politics pitting pro-Enlightenment liberals against pro-Catholic conservatives, the handful of moderates enjoying almost no influence. All parties agreed, in principle, that a war against the US was inevitable; as a noted general observed as early as 1827, “The North Americans have conquered whatever territory adjoins them,” although his warning failed to spark an effort to modernize or otherwise prepare the army for that conflict. What would happen, many Mexican elites predicted, was that the war would forge a nation of Mexico, uniting Indians and creoles and giving a sense of common purpose. It did not work, Henderson notes: In the end, Mexico wound up ceding 55 percent of its land, and it would be politically unstable for decades to come.
Some provocative side notes on why the US did not annex Mexico—something that, Henderson observes, some gringos call for even today.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-8090-6120-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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