Early in a sixteen-year sojourn in Mexico as an engineer for an American mining company, John W. F. Dulles became fascinated by the story of Mexico's emergence as a modern nation, and was imbued with the urge to tell that story as it had not yet been told-by letting events speak for themselves, without any interpretations or appraisal. The resultant book offers an interesting paradox: it is "chronicle" in the medieval sense-a straightforward...