This is perhaps the best comprehensive history of Mexico written in English that exists. The authors have been painstaking in their research and provide many, many sources and citations but do not litter the work with a cumbersome academic citation apparatus. Best of all, the provide an annotated bibliography of works in Spanish for the Mexican scholar.
The history of Mexico is astonishingly rich and complex, riven with conflict, religious strife, and fundamental disagreements about constitutionalism, liberalism (small L) and foreign entanglments. It is also a sad story with near constant violence and upheaval. The redeeming feature of the history, and what pulls the story along and saves it from the maudalin, is the stoic character of the mexican people.
This is comprehensive work that deals in turn with society, culture, economics, religion and politics. Being a single volume work, it certainly gives brief treatments of many topics. As a prior reviewer notes, the colonial period is not treated as deeply as others. But then again, it was three hundered years of economic explotation and social subjugation, what is left to say?
This is an excellent work for the Mexican enthusiast, for serious historians as well as for Americans of all persuasions.
