The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, July 1945 - April, 1946 Page: 181

Book Reviews

and fifty Texans who had shut themselves up in the old mission
building, the Alamo" (p. 214). If Miss Shippen were not on the
verge, at this point, of preparing us for Santa Anna's lightning
travel from Venezuela to Mexico, we might not be able to under-
stand how so much territory could be traversed in four days.
Gross as are some of its errors, the book is evidently the result
of a good deal of work. The author has taken pains to make it
useful, and presumably authoritative, by including an index and
a bibliography, which is respectable in length and, on the
whole, in its sources. George Vaillant's Aztecs of Mexico, how-
ever, is the only recent authority cited on Mexican Indians. One
wonders at the omission of Gann and Thompson's History of the
Maya, with its account of extensive archaeological investigation,
and for that matter, of Thompson's history of the Aztec civiliza-
tion. And why should Stuart Chases's Mexico be listed, to the
exclusion of Redfield's Tepoztlan, on which Mr. Chase's book was
so largely based? If the author intended to be accurate, it is
unfortunate that, having labored long, she did not take the
additional time necessary to make her book trustworthy. A book
designed to give information, even on the careless level of
juvenility, should be scrupulously accurate.
It may be too much to say that New Found World, in spite
of an attractive format and a real charm of style, should not
have been written at all. But it assuredly is not too much to say
that while it was still in manuscript the publishers should have
had it checked by some one competent to judge its reliability.
MARY GRACE MUSE ADKINS
The University of Texas
Jefferson Davis and His Cabinet. By Rembert W. Patrick. Baton
Rouge (Louisiana State University Press), 1944. Pp.
x+368. Bibliography and index. $3.75.
Students of history are again indebted to the Louisiana State
University Press for a scholarly work of excellent craftsmanship.
Professor Patrick's book is one that teachers and historians would
do well to peruse, for he has searched widely, dug deep, and
presented with skill new facts and new conclusions pertaining
to the administrative departments of the government of the
Confederate States of America. The bibliography is excellent
and extensive. The author, for instance, examined thirty-six

181