This was gifted to me by my friend's father when I mentioned I that I'm interested in reading more about American history. Given that he's originally from Texas, I suppose he thought that Texan War for Independence was a very significant part of American history.

The book was a chronological account leading up to the war, and key stages of the war itself, with bios of key members on the Mexican and Texan sides. The author took a balanced approach, drawing from various sources, but didn't interpret the effects of the war as much as I would have liked. Military history is not something I've actively sought reading about, so the accounts of the battles were a little tedious, and I'm glad that the book was quite short.

Some interesting tidbits I learnt:

1. The Indian Removal Act – the fact that this exists in human history is mind boggling, but says a lot about America's current relationship with humans who don't suffer from melanin deficiency.

2. Guns in the 19th Century – in this context, the Second Amendment makes sense. There's a nice explanation of how to load 19th century rifles (it takes fucking ages. Too long for the average millennial's attention span.), and how accurate they were (not very). All the rifles used on Mexican and Texan sides had 1-3 RPM – highly ineffective if you want to massacre 50 black people peacefully praying at church.

3. The American Dream was real – the majority of the Texan bios went something like this:

James W. Collingworth (aka Stinky Pete) was born to a poor family in Tennessee and was so poorly educated that he couldn't even write dates in the correct format. He left for New Orleans sometimes in his 20s, where he earned his first fortune as a pirate. After capture and imprisonment for 18 months, he joined the New Orleans Greys, which were deployed to Texas as volunteers to the war. He very quickly rose to the rank of Brigadier Lieutenant Major General Captain due to his skill in killing a lot of Mexicans. After the war, he received 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 acres in land (seriously, how fucking big is Texas????), and $10000 (worth £20m today). He spent the rest of his life active in Texas, and made some lady birth 50 of his progeny. He had height, hair, eyes, and a personality.

4. Everyone was hugely incompetent – the war very easily could have been won by either side if not for the idiots.

5. The Pastry War – hilarious name, but I was disappointed to learn that this had nothing to do with pastry. I was imagining the Mexicans and French hurling croissants at each other, but it was marginally more serious than that. ( )