A Leap to Arms: The Cuban Campaign of 1898

For purposes of "perspective,""nostalgia," and the Great Battles of History series, free-lance writer Dierks recreates that ""splendid little war"" in the Caribbean so exuberantly welcomed by a strapping young America awakening to her expansionist role. Dierks straddles the ideological fence--"Humanitarian and imperialist designs both played their part, contributing in a joint way that only the beliefs of a confident century could have fostered"--relying on the picturesque to supersede the analytical. Essentially he appreciates the Spanish-American War as a historical Happening--not solely the sinister product of Admiral Mahan's Sea Power agitation, capitalist-imperialist conniving, or naked manifest destiny drives, but a direct manifestation, almost healthy in its inevitability, of the American late Victorian Zeitgeist. "National popular attitudes--fostered and given voice in the press and representation on the highest levels in Washington--were the real moving force." In energetic fashion, Dierks depicts the onset of war fever, the Maine precipitants of armed conflict, and the bungling execution of our military-naval operations, exceeded in ineptness only by the Spanish mismoves. Army-Navy wrangling, animosity between an admiral and a commodore, and the unpopularity of a commanding general are features of the campaign rendered more prominently here than Rough Riding heroics. The pre- and postwar analyses are lean but adequate for amateur appetites. Taken on its own terms, it's unapologetic war fare. Kirkus Reviews