I still have not finished the conclusion of the peasant wars. It is anticlimactic. I was hoping there some interesting insights that Wolf is able to derive from juxtaposing multiple peasant rebellions. Instead the conclusion is filled with banalities. --------------------------------------- I am done with china and am currently on Viet Nam. The end of china was a letdown. It sort of fizzled and ended rather abruptly. Why not describe the further standoff between Kou Ming Tang (sp?) and the Communists after 49. Or during WWII. There is nothing about the world war in the book at all. Or the commies kicking the Japanese/American arse out of china after WWII. Or the KMT settling in Taiwan? I mean, wouldn't it be also part of the peasant uprising? Overall, Wolf is uneven. I am glad we are reading the book. And we are enjoying it because some (most of it, actually) of the stuff we already know so the book titillates the brain's memory zones. Wolf carries class analysis to the extreme -- refusing the provide any personal info on anyone. One annoyance that was not as apparent in Mexico is that Wolf is not actually describing the uprisings. That is, not in the traditional sense of giving the sequence of events as they happen. He sort of provides patches of history, like CPP settling in the northwest and analyzes those. ----------------------------------------- In Wolf. I am done with the mexicans and russians. I am also half-way through chinese. The chapters on mexicans and russians feel rushed. The Makhno's rebellion is covered in a page or two. You get more from Lous' postings on Marxmail. I like Wolf's analysis of the events and his focus on the peasantry. So his essays is not so much the (exhaustive) history of the peasant revolts but his attempt at interpreting and analyzing their causes and driving forces. Oh, yeah, Wolf does not give much credence to the Bolshies. They just filled the power-vacuum while the peasants were left to do what they always wanted to do. Shit Taiping rebellion was suppressed at the (estimated) cost of 20 million lives. And it is just a regional peasant revolt. 20 million is the stated (by soviets) figure of soviet casualties in the WWII. ----------------------------------------- I agree with you, first 30-some pages go well. Solid economic and class analysis. Setting up the conflict. I keep thinking of "The Mexican" by Jack London -- he was fighting to get guns for the revolution against Dias. Anyways, I knew little about Mexican history and this fills in the gap nicely. One downside I noticed -- the author refers mostly to english-language sources (No habla espanol?).