The Real Contra War: Highlander Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua (review)
infelicities. Entire pages of footnotes frequently offer insights at least as great as those found in the text itself. The press apparently exercised little editorial guidance, and the lack of even a single map is unfortunate in a text as heavily regionalized as this one. More lamentable still is the tendency either to consign scholars who differ to the enemy camp or to ignore them entirely. “Marxist interpretations” (pp. 6– 8) would include not only Jaime Wheelock and José Luis Velásquez in Nicaragua, but Edelberto Torres-Rivas and Héctor Pérez Brignoli regionally, indicating the author places even the mildest forms of historical structuralism at odds with such elite bargaining models of democratization. Finally, the author’s failure to engage or cite any of the relevant works by Julie Charlip, Elizabeth Dore, Michel Gobat, Jeffrey Gould, or Justin Wolfe needlessly isolates itself from a lively field of contemporary debate. Nicaragua’s Conservative Republic convincingly shows that the image of a Nicaragua genetically indisposed to political stability is a historical mirage created by the noxious mixture of liberal successes, excesses, and failures, stirred to a boiling point by often clumsy foreign interventionism. This is no small achievement. However, while Nicaraguans supremely chastened by the Walker fiasco may have had good reasons to sacrifice any other goal on the altar of political stability and caution, historians would be well advised not to swear fealty to such singular goals or partisan visions.