Faced with a long three-day weekend and a shelf devoid of new reading material, I decided to discover what sort of colonial books, if any, my local bookstore might carry. Investigations of the "history" and "war" sections proved disappointing, but an inspection of the "biography" section revealed a book with a promising subject if uninspired title.

The book was Warrior: The Legend of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen and it was authored by Peter Capstick whose exciting works on big game hunting I was long familiar. I normally read several reviews before determining whether or not to purchase a book, but I decided to break with custom on this occasion and buy the book "blind" as it were given its subject matter and my knowledge of the author. Poorer by $25, I am nonethless rich now in the experience of the dangers of impulse buying.

Richard Meinertzhagen is an intriguing man who carved out his niche in history with his exploits as an intelligence officer in the British army and with his contributions to ornithology. During WWI he conducted a highly successful campaign of misinformation against the Turks that was instrumental in the British capture of Beersheba and ultimately the entirety of Gaza. As Allenby's chief political officer he was a major player in the creation of the state of Palestine and later in Israel itself. He also published a seminal work on the birds of Arabia and provided the British Museum with one of its greatest collections of bird skins and their parasites. His was a career tarnished with controversy, however. He had a reputation for being ruthless, and T. E. Lawrence wrote that "he took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in splattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans...with his African knob-kerri."

While never formally reprimanded, his involvement in the death of a Nandi chieftain during a parlay was investigated three times by the military and probably lowered the ceiling on his advancement within the officer ranks. There is also evidence that many of the specimens he contributed to the British Museum were in fact stolen from other collections.

Unfortunately much of this controversy is either glossed over or simply goes unmentioned in Capstick's account. Capstick's life parallels Meinertzhagen's in many ways (both for example left the commerical world to pursue lives of physical adventure in Africa) and one suspects the author lost much of his capacity to provide a critical life assessment in his over-identification with his subject.

No mention is made for example of Meinertzhagen's suspected theft of wildlife specimens, and his accusers in the pivotal Nandi case are dismissed with ad hominem arguments. The lack of any critical assessment of Meinertzhagen's life becomes even more obvious when one considers the author's sources: virtually every note in the book refers back to one of Meinertzhagen's own published diaries and there are no references to any other primary sources that could provide corraborative information.

Capstick's conversational writing style also cries out for extensive editorial revision containing as it does frequent digressions into the author's personal experiences and/or opinions. The digressions often seem irrelevant and interrupt the book's narrative flow. Those containing the author's opinions on social and environmental issues feel especially out of place and will no doubt alienate many readers. Consider for instance the following account of Meinertzhagen's murder of a man: "...a few months before that Dick had caught his groom, or syce, brutally maltreating his two polo ponies. Dick thrashed the coolie very severely, finally thumping him on the head with a polo mallet, which eventually killed him. I defy any reader to drop me a line saying Dick was out of line in [this] instance. Our world needs more of Dick's type, not less. We have become a conglomerate of hapless victims in a world awash with crime and cruelty on all fronts, people being afraid to stand their ground, speak up, and strike back."

The book also contains few references to Meinertzhagen's personal life, which is oftentimes exactly the sort of information a reader craves in biography. Most readers already approach a biography with a passing knowledge of the subject's public accomplishments, and it is information disinterred by the biographer on such private matters as the subject's married life that most interest them. Meinertzhagen was married twice but unless the reader is attentive he may finish the book with the impression that Meinertzhagen was only married once or not at all. Capstick for example devotes only four sentences to describing Meinertzhagen's first marriage, and this account is not even dignified with its own paragraph, tacked on as it is to a longer description of the subject's racist attitudes.

The book was published posthumously which may help explain its unpolished writing, raising as it does the question of whether the book represents in fact a preliminary draft. If this is the case then the book's publisher, St. Martin's Press, deserves criticism for not having advertised the book as such or for not having an editor make sorely needed revisions. In any case it is a bad book on multiple counts and cannot be recommended.