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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a great novel of the mexican revolution,
By
This review is from: The Adelita (Hardcover)
I first read this many years ago: it's a powerful story indeed, and so with the advent of Amazon I was able to get a couple of copies (one for home, one for the office) for myself. It's about Robert MacBean Palacios, who has a rich American father and a Mexican mother from a fine family. You get swept along from some of the early days of the revolution--which seems very local where MacBean is--to the larger scope of things--the armies, the war on a greater scale. Hall does a magnificent job in his descriptions of the people and the place. MacBean meets Adelita, a soldata, who becomes his woman. But in the revolution you don't own things--MacBean and Adelita part, rejoin, and part again.
You meet many of the historical personages (such as Villa) along the violent path. There are major battles and small skirmishes: MacBean and Adelita are very lucky to remain among the living. The novel takes you up into the 1970s, long after you thought the revolution was finished, and you find that Hall has presented a wonderful kind of juxtaposition--much has actually stayed the same. I reread the novel every couple of years--it's a beautifully written novel, driven both by action and character. It's a deeply satisfying book and it will have a powerful effect on you. For a current book that covers some of the same areas of Mexico--about drug gangs, try Grant's harrowing nonfiction God's Middle Finger. Chihuahua and surrounding areas of Mexico were dangerous places during the revolution, and are much more dangerous now. Robert Service's line "And deaths that just hang by a hair" has been true at the time of both books. A fine novel!
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pobre México! Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!,
By
This review is from: The Adelita (Hardcover)
This is the best book about the Mexican Revolution. It is a novel, but provides enough history in the storyline, and in the periodic asides by the narrator into the background of Mexico and that county's tribulations between 1914 and 1970, to give any reader an understanding of the brutal history of Mexico during much of the 20th century.
The narrator is Michael MacBean Palacio, son of an American father and a Mexican mother, raised until 10 in the northwest Mexican hacienda of his mother's family, and, after the lingering death of his natural mother, in the mansion of his father's second wife in Pasadena, California. A child of privilege, graduate of Andover, graduate of Harvard, and leader of a band of guerrilla cavalry during the war to overthrow the Mexican dictator Huerta. Also, the lover of Adelita, the woman of the title, the living symbol of the revolution, whose name also that of the Mexican soldier's wife in a famous and very real ballad of the Revolution. Oakley Hall, the author of this book, is also the author of the "The Downhill Racer" which was made into a movie staring Robert Redford, and of "Warlock", a book loosely based on the Earp brothers experiences at Tombstone, which was also made into a movie; this one staring Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Anthony Quinn. Oakley Hall is unparalleled in the portrayal of the American frontier, where the law is distance and tenuous, and it is up to the characters of his books to establish their own. To establish it with great difficulty and often with bloodshed, and always with uncertainty about the cost that must be paid. In "The Adelita" there is no longer any law in 1914 in Mexico, after the fall of Porfirio Diaz, President and dictator for 30 years, and then the murder of his successor, Francisco Madero by the general Victoriano Huerta. Well, there is still the law of force, as there was under Diaz: The law of the Federal government led by a dictator and enforced on an unwilling population, and the law of the rebel armies of the Revolution, who swarm across the land like locust, gradually converging on Mexico City. One such army, a real army in fact, the Army of the Northwest, led by Alvero Obregon, is given a fictitious leader of its cavalry division, General Elias Justo, who becomes MacBean's mentor and champion. MacBean becomes part of the conflict by chance, being at the right place at the right time, in Mexico in 1914 prospecting for oil. And yet, not only by chance, because he is half Mexican, because the adventure and the righteousness of the Revolution appeals to him, because with his participation comes the love of the Adelita, and because of the trust and goodness of Elias Justo, who seems to see always into MacBean's soul. This is a violent book, as was the Mexican Revolution. As MacBean says at what point, "These are violent people". And as Justo says to MacBean later, "What a profound thing war is, my friend! In which each man discovers the best and the worst of himself." Like many others, MacBean learns the worst of himself during this war. Only later, during the war of the successors, serving on the side of Venustiano Carranza and Obregon as an organizer of medical services to the army fighting Villa - and Justo - at the great battle of Celaya, where he possibly earns some redemption for saving lives on the battlefield, not only anonymous wounded, but Adelita herself, who has followed first Justo and then Villa, hoping to find the true and honest champions of the Revolution. A hopeless task in a Mexico gone mad. With the war of the successors decided, Obregon the winner, Villa and Justo defeated, Emiliano Zapata and Carranza already dead, MacBean leaves Mexico to serve as a medical volunteer in the European War of 1914 that outstrips even that of the Mexican Revolution in the amount of bloodshed, if not in the hatred generated. Later, like his father, he goes into the oil business in California. Where the sins of his own father, who is involved in the Tea Pot Dome oil scandal, are visited on the son. He marries and fathers two children by his first wife, who, not strong to begin with, is stressed beyond limits by MacBean's ties to the Adelita, who calls him back to Mexico to rescue her son. The child is supposedly the son of Elias Justo, but really the son of MacBean himself. The Adelita has foreseen the assassination by their political enemies of both Villa and Justo, and a potential threat of those enemies to the "child" of Justo. The rescue mission, which involves escape through a land of desert, populated by bandits and personal enemies, is as harrowing as any other part of the book. ("When they carried me across the border at Nogales, in a blanket, I weighed ninety-six pounds.") And yet, even this escape does not free MacBean from his ties to Mexico, because his son is to be raised as the son of Elias Justo and the Adelita, so a youth of destiny, inevitably to be called by the Adelita to Mexico as a politician and potential savior of the Revolution. But who can live up to such dreams for such a country? In 1968, witnessed by MacBean, the government, which his son is part of, orders the pre-Olympic massacre of protesting students at Tlatelolco in Mexico City. And thus MacBean is drawn back into the unfinished struggle for some sort of justice or righteousness or legality in Mexico. MacBean, conflicted son of a failed father, rapist, murderer, poor husband, good father - as far as he is able, is also a savior of people when he can. Not only by his medical work during the Great War and during the Mexican War of the Successors, but by multiple acts of charity during the years between his flight from Mexico with his son and the massacre at Tlatelolco. And yet, Mexico and the Revolution are his true love, and the Revolution is his ultimate source of redemption. One thing Oakley Hall does in this book is mix in stories from real I witnesses of the Revolution as MacBean's memories. The first time I caught him at this I was outraged. It was a passage from John Reed's "Insurgent Mexico, With Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution". Yet a bit later, MacBean writes that he himself is writing in old age, and his memories are mixed and confused, so that it is only natural that he would find events 50 years earlier interpreted through books that he has read. I loved that idea and how it is carried out in the book, adding rather than subtracting to the authenticity of the narrator's memoirs. In addition, without apology, one of the great victories won by Elias Justo in this book is modeled on the historic capture of Ciudad Juarez by Pancho Villa. For anyone wanting a quick guide to Mexico and the Revolution, I suggest John Gunther's "Inside Latin America", published in 1940. At a time when the generals who had ruled Mexico since the Revolution were just losing their hold on power, and Gunther was on the lookout for German, Italian and Japanese sympathizers throughout all of Latin America. He didn't find many, and those that were there were quietly rounded up under US direction when the US entered World War II. But anyone who reads the newspapers or follows on the Internet knows that Mexico today is still a land of violent people and doubtful justice.
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