This is an engrossing recent history of politics in a Third World country. Fortunately, it is not an academic's history. There is no difficulty feeling that one is reading about very real people. There is no pedantry, no wearisome show of neutrality or the coy evasiveness of the book learner. Instead, it is told from a definite point of view, with all the bias but also with boldness, the detail and the brilliance of opinion that the style allows.
Its lessons apply generally. Every West Indian politician, every citizen, must study it if he or she must understand more deeply the opportunity, the seriousness and the responsibility of politics. He or she must understand that the press must be free and that it is endangered; that foreign interests must be restrained and are not; that self-styled intellectuals are not always as knowledgeable as they might seem.
Though this book is not a professor’s book, the professors especially must read it. For not only is it a therapeutic, it also provides excellent empirical grist for theoretical mills. Herein, we find all our enamored categories. But not merely labelled and peopled with ideal types. Instead, delineated by vivid descriptions of actual personalities.
First, the Intellectuals: Whether catalysts or cause or merely the result of modernization, always enemies of the old order, always searching for models, always most vocal, always questioning, probing, agitating, but too often alienated from the people and politically naive. Then, the Peasantry: Ignorant and impoverished but the hope of the intellectuals. Then the Politically Entrenched: Wily, durable, resistant to change, determined to stay in power. Then the Aristocracy: Sensing the end, fighting a timorous rear-guard action. And The Local bourgeoisie: Too weak to provide a counterweight to government. Finally, in the background, too confident for ostentation, The Foreign Interest.
It is the peculiar merit of this book that all of these types and more are clearly depicted that we may understand them. And in understanding them, learn to better control our destiny.
---Bernard Boxill, Ph.D., University of California.
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