novel, if nothing else, would seem to offer some idea of what an ungodly nightmare the French must have endured. One also has to wonder how Vietnam and Brazil would have eventually turned out if the outcomes of either battle had gone the other way. Resistance versus submission is a moral question going back at least as far Sophocle's Antigone. On a weekend on which WPFW is intermittently playing Reverend King's speeches on non-violence, it's hard to maintain my usual skepticism about pacifism. As the massacres of Mennonites in Russia and Buddhist monks in Burma suggest, pacifism can be an invitation to tyranny. On the other hand, you have the atrocities visited upon the resisters at Canudos. As the gyre of hate in the United States ever widens ( http://michellemalkin.com/2011/01/10/... ) the idea of withdrawing from the world and adopting a more ascetic lifestyle, ready to flee, grows increasingly attractive. So thank you Mario Vargas Llosa for the food for thought and a great book. (less) I sheepishly admit that upon seeing the title and the praise without reading anything about the description, I thought that this would be some sort of science fiction epic. I was understandably disappointed within the first few pages when I realized that it was not science but historical fiction. That said, the story was more engrossing than a lot of sci-fi I have read, with interesting characters and events. For various reasons, I couldn't put it down and finished all five hundred and some-odd