From Publishers Weekly
Making the most of his meticulous research, Ward, a novelist and essayist, has written an unhurried?the more impatient might say relentless?and lavishly detailed account of an unorganized and bloody revolt that swept through northern India in the summer of 1857 and of the even bloodier reprisals the British took against the rebels. And against Indians in general. The result is a vivid history of a chain of massacres and counter-massacres that might, at first glance, seem of little interest to an American audience. Writing chiefly?although not always sympathetically?from the European point of view, Ward succeeds by building on the well-documented lives of specific people: British officers, their wives (some of whom were Indian), local princes, Eurasian clerks, American missionaries, British reformers, Hindu and Muslim servants (the mutiny made allies of these customary enemies). Ward, who writes in the lively, near-journalistic tradition of such nonacademic American historians as Barbara Tuchman, William L. Shirer and his own brother, Geoffrey Ward, doesn't moralize or editorialize. In less skillful or less selective hands, this deluge of minutiae might have created a forest-for-the-trees problem, but here the facts speak tellingly and forcefully for themselves. Illustrated.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The sheer massiveness of this book apparently about a virtual jot in time may daunt many prospective readers. It should not. For although Ward focuses on the 1857 slaughter of the British community at Cawnpore--the critical turning point in ending the hegemony of the East India Company in British India--his work is in fact a comprehensive history of the events of a most crucial year. Ward has thoroughly used just about every conceivable resource, and he is forthright about the self-serving quality of many of the primary ones. Better, he has written his synthesis of them so well that long as the result may be, it is seldom heavy going. Cawnpore was a grisly affair that reflects little credit on most of those involved in it, especially its instigator, the Nana Sahib. This account of it, however, reflects great credit on Ward; he has created the ideal companion to Hibberts' Great Mutiny (1978) and a new touchstone for studies of British India. Roland Green
