The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 4 March 1998
by John Reed
John Reed, famous for his depiction of the Russian Revolution of 1917-18 (he was, after all, buried in Red Square), spent some of 1913 in Mexico, during Pancho Villa's constitutionalist revolution against a military dictatorship that arose after the fall of Porfirio Dias. This memoir is Reed's reportage on Mexican culture and the war's terrible battles. Reed writes in an immediate journalistic style that is often dry and objective, but just as often sympathetic and touching. The history contained here reveals some of the mysteries of Mexican politics near the turn of the twentieth century. It illustrates, too, some of today's politics in the American South, and south of the border.