As the centennial of Colombia’s Thousand Days War (1899–1902) approached, historians began producing retrospectives of the conflict. This 17-essay collection is part of that body of work. Interest in the last and most destructive of Colombia’s nineteenth-century civil wars has been heightened by similarities between those wars and Colombia’s present armed conflict. Students of Colombia hope that the peace, which ended the earlier war, might offer insights into ways of concluding the country’s current civil war.The essays contained here are grouped in six categories. The first, consisting of essays by Thomas Fischer and Eduardo Posada Carbó, place the Thousand Days War in regional context, that of Latin America at large. The second group, dealing with the war’s participants, are written by Fernán González, Malcolm Deas, Hermes Tovar, José David Cortés, Aída Martínez, and Rubén Sierra. This group also contains a piece by turn-of-the-century writer Adolfo León Gómez, who described wartime prison conditions.Music, fiction, and painting created during the war are subjects of the third group of essays. Their authors are Allie Duque, H. R. Moreno-Durán, and Beatriz González. The fourth group consists of Mario Aguilera’s essay on the forms of discipline imposed by Liberal guerrilla commanders upon soldiers guilty of human rights violations and other crimes. His piece is paired with Gonzalo Sánchez’s essay comparing the amnesty effected after the Thousand Days War with that accompanying the partial guerrilla demobilization of the early 1980s.The fifth grouping brings together essays by Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo and Charles Bergquist, in which the writers compare the Thousand Days War with Colombia’s current revolutionary insurgency. A sixth and concluding section contains nine documents relating to the Thousand Days War and the peace that followed it.Two things make this collection a welcome addition to literature on Colombia’s Thousand Days War: (1) its thematic breadth, the fresh insights contained in its essays, and the fact that it counts so many top students of Colombia among its contributors; and (2) the light it sheds on both Colombia’s last nineteenth-century civil war and its present one.Most notable among these essays, in the sense of offering new and original information on the war, is Hermes Tovar’s examination of the common soldier in the conflict. Tovar, one of Colombia’s leading historians, bases his profile of the average soldier on analysis of 26,000 petitions filed by war veterans between the 1930s and 1950s, housed in Colombia’s National Archives. His piece contains a wealth of previously unavailable data concerning rank and geographic origin of soldiers. And since he centers the essay on his own great uncle, a volunteer who served and died in the war, Tovar’s piece stands as a personal meditation on the futility of Colombia’s bygone conflicts.Key in helping us gain perspective on Colombia’s current civil war are the essays by Aguilera, Jaramillo, and Bergquist. Mario Aguilera reveals that crime and civil rights violations prevalent in Colombia’s contemporary conflict are quite similar to the savagery and criminality that made the Thousand Days War so ghastly. Aguilera further suggests that the violence toward civilians seen in Colombia’s civil wars is to an extent unique to that nation.Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo and Charles Bergquist offer sobering suggestions as to where Colombia’s present civil war may be heading. Jaramillo points to the importance of the neutral citizenry, acting as a pressure group, in bringing the Thousand Days War to an end. But while he stresses the citizenry’s hope for a peaceful conclusion to armed conflict, a constant in all of Colombia’s civil wars, Bergquist reminds readers that the Thousand Days War was, in fact, ended through decisive, uncompromising, and effective military action carried out by government forces. Remarking on today’s conflict, Bergquist further suggests that the rapid strengthening of paramilitary forces in regions of illegal drug production is related to growing public disillusionment with the Communist guerrillas. He implies, at least to this reviewer, that peace will come to twenty-first-century Colombia, as it did in 1902, through vigorous military action against the communist FARC and ELN. In such eventuality Colombia’s illegal drug business will pass into hands of local elites and their paramilitaries, groups that will coexist with Colombia’s constitutional government in a relatively peaceful way. Thus the nation’s illegal drug trade will be rationalized and peace will return to Colombia.Memoria de un país en guerra is recommended to students of Colombia both for the new insights it brings to that country’s Thousand Days War and for the way it invites fresh conjecture on Colombia’s present civil strife and the shape of the peace to come.