This work does not reflect credit either on the author or the publisher. Nowhere is the reader informed that the book is, for the most part, a simple condensation of the useful two-volume Breve historia de la Revolución by the same author. Nowhere is it acknowledged that entire paragraphs—indeed entire pages—have been lifted en masse from the Breve historia. Nowhere is there any indication that the Fondo de Cultura Económica, the publishers of the original work, granted the author and the new publishers permission for such duplication. Of the 135 pages there are only 95 pages of text. Useful maps? Charts? Pictures? None! Only numerous blank pages with chapter headings counted in the numerical sequence.
Among the long duplicated passages the author interjects brief descriptive paragraphs concerning the European antecedents of Mexican political thought. These paragraphs are in no way profound or even original, but merely assure the reader that Mexican revolutionaries were familiar with Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, and Pierre Joseph Proudhon as well as with novelists Victor Hugo, Eugene Sue, Benito Pérez Galdós, Anatole France, Leo Tolstoi, and Honoré de Balzac. The type or extent of the influence exerted, however, is not very clearly indicated, for the author simply states that these men were not unknown in Mexico. (A five-minute taxi ride through Colonia Polanco in Mexico City serves much the same purpose.) All in all the book will be of value only to those persons who do not have access to the Breve historia.
