Customer Reviews

Two Roads to Guadalupe

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I've recommended this book to my friends for decades as a comic history, in fictional form, of a tragic episode in American Hisstory. Try it.

With The Travels of Jamie McPheeters easily in my top three books of all time, I started searching for more books by Robert Lewis Taylor. Maybe because I had to compare this to his incredible work with McPheeters, but Guadulupe was a disappointment. It's a story surrounding a journey to, well, Guadulupe, but with none of the wonderfully eccentric and interesting characters that made McPheeters so enjoyable. The pace was a bit slow and I found myself forcing myself to get through sections of the book. There are still some good laughs and Taylor has a distinctive style that I enjoy reading, but those looking for something as great as McPheeters, you will most likely be disappointed.

This book is based on the author's research, and he includes a bibliography at the back of the book. What we have here is a novel that borders on being non-fiction, because it adheres pretty closely to the archival record Mr. Taylor examined. He read through many, many journals kept by soldiers, officers, and others, about their experiences in this Mexican War. What Taylor comes up with is a somewhat entertaining "introduction" to the Mexican War. It's an introduction for those who know little about the Mexican War, like myself. I learned a lot from this book, and I re-learned that sometimes it's easier to swallow your history with a human story than straight from the history book. BUT...as noted elsewhere on this website, the book does have a tendency to get dull. Maybe Taylor tried too hard to make it authentic by mimicking the journal-keepers of those days. Also, he spends a lot of time describing the flora, fauna, and architecture, and for spoiled readers of the present day, that may be a little too much work. We need more short dialogue and less hard-core narrative, today. So, this book, published in 1964, offers palatable history, but not much emotion or excitement, and very little sex, though there are women in this war, some dressed as men, and this, too, is based on journalistic evidence uncovered by Mr. Taylor, who I doubt still lives, though I don't know for sure. Diximus.