Donald J. Gara

Though I think it's a useful thing to have a study that traces the entire wartime career of what was probably the most important Loyalist regiment in the American Revolution, and Gara does a perfectly acceptable job of dealing with the military nuts and bolts of the story, there are some quirky editorial touches to this work.

To cut to the chase, there's this passive-aggressive quality to the writing, such as when Gara notes at the start that he wants to treat the conflict as a civil war, but trots out the old chestnut that there "were brave men on both sides." Gara then ends the book with a wishy-washy paragraph bemoaning the loss of human capital to the new republic that the exile of the Loyalist population meant, but then turns around and notes that there would then be no Canada as we understand it today without this migration. Further, you would think that a book that spends a good bit of time talking about John Graves Simcoe (the most important commander of the regiment), would make note of the man's significant role in the creation of Canada as a separate society, besides noting that the Canadian Army's contemporary "Queen's York Rangers" upholds the history of the unit that Gara just spent a whole book writing about.

This all makes me want to know more about the author, and his nationality and politics; not that I could find a hint of this online.… (más)