The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 74, July 1970 - April, 1971 Page: 575

Book Reviews

in emphasizing what Seale calls the general's scorn of ministers, his
praise of religion merely to show his contempt for churches, and his
mockery of religious matters. Actually Houston had a good Scotch
Presbyterian background and an amazing fund of Biblical quotations.
Uncomplimentary characteristics pointed out by the author include
Houston's relish of flattery, his passion for clothes, his obsession for
controlling situations, his strutting on the national stage in the role of
man of destiny, and his thoughtlessness in pulling his wife and the
children from home to home because of his own restlessness of spirit.
Historians must rejoice that Seale's persuasiveness and perserverance
secured for his use a number of family manuscripts hitherto unavail-
able. Historians and archivists will be horrified and frustrated by the
story of Margaret Houston's burning of stacks of Houston documents
because of her own frustration and pique at an eastern editor's indif-
ference to William Carey Crane's proposal to write a Houston biog-
raphy. She felt that if the world was not interested in the true Hous-
ton, her revenge would be in the destruction of the letters which
revealed that true Houston. How extensive the loss was will never be
known. Time and its ravages, plus other burnings of documents which
were considered "uninteresting" or "too intimate" meant further loss
before the compilation of the eight volumes of the Writings of Sam
Houston between 1938 and 1943. This use by Seale of new material
emphasizes the need for a new editing of Houston correspondence to
include all known and available Houston writings with the addition
of correspondence addressed to Houston to give illumination and
interpretation to his own letters.
University of Texas, Austin LLERENA FRIEND
The Church and Social Change in Latin America. Edited by Henry
A. Landsberger. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1970o. Pp. xii + 219. Notes, index. $9.50.)
Each of the ten essays comprising this work deserves publication
in a journals of opinion or history, together they do not deserve pub-
lication in such an expensive hardcover book with such an ambitious
title. The geographical area covered is limited primarily to Chile,
Brazil, Argentina, and Peru (in that order of emphasis) with occa-
sional glimpses at Venezuela, Mexico, and other countries. The work
has all the defects one has come to expect from collections of unrelated

575