Mexico: A 500-Year History

by Paul Gillingham

A Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of 2025

From acclaimed and prize-winning historian Paul Gillingham, a rich and vibrant history of one of the world’s most diverse, politically ground-breaking, and influential of countries

At the beginning of his masterful work of scholarship and narration, Paul Gillingham writes, from its outset “Mexico was more profoundly, globally hybrid than anywhere else in the prior history of the world.” Over the ensuing five centuries, Mexicans have prefigured and shaped the course of human lives across the globe.

Gillingham begins in 1511 with the dramatic shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in the far south of Mexico. Ten years later Hernán Cortés led an army of European adventurers and indigenous rebels to seize the legendary island city of Tenochtitlán, the center of Montezuma’s empire, the largest in the Americas. The capture of the future Mexico City was, more than an extraordinary military event, the collision of two long-separated worlds, radically different in everything from biota to urban planning. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate, and a city larger and more sophisticated than anything they had ever seen. Mexicans discovered horses, wheels, and lethal germs, sparking a cataclysmic century of disease that wiped out a majority of the pre-existing population and led to a unique recombination of European and indigenous cultures. The industrial mining of Mexico’s silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world. Mexico’s independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821 led to a calamitous mid-century war with the United States and one of the first great social revolutions that brought peace for Mexicans throughout many of the global horrors of the 20th century, before the country itself collapsed into the violence of the cartels and a refugee crisis in the 2000s.

The history of Mexico has been, Gillingham shows, one of suffering empire but also of overcoming. Through it all the country set new standards for inclusivity, for progressive social policies, for artistic expression, for adroitly balancing dictatorship and democracy. While racial divides endured, so too did indigenous peoples, who enjoyed rights unthinkable in the United States. Mexico was among the first countries to abolish slavery in 1829, and Mexicans elected North America’s first Black president, Vicente Guerrero, its only indigenous president, Benito Juárez, and its only woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum.

As elegantly written as it is powerful in scope, rich in character and anecdote, Mexico uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World History, Latin American

716 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 18, 2025

Reviews

[Rick Riordan]

A fascinating panorama of Mexico's history from the fall of the Aztec Empire to modern day. Mexican history seemed like a glaring hole in my knowledge base, especially since I grew up in Texas and lived a great deal of my life so close to the border. In the U.S., we learn about Mexico as a tangent of our own history, if we learn about it at all, but reversing the focus and seeing the U.S., and the rest of the world, from the Mexican perspective, was a real eye-opener for me.

Some take-aways: Mexico has always been a difficult place to rule and an even more difficult place to unify, from the days of indigenous rule through the Spanish vice-regency, right up to today. There has always been strong local resistance to centralized rule, whether that rule came from Spain or Mexico City. The saying obedezco pero no cumplo, “I obey but I won’t do it," sums up the dynamic well.

I also enjoyed the medieval Spanish oath to the kings which Gillingham shares, which is about as far from the divine right of kings as you can imagine: "We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided that you observe all our liberties and laws; but if not, not."

And of course, the Mexican saying that I knew before now takes on a whole new meaning: Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho, between word and fact there’s a big gap. Mexico may be one thing in theory, or on paper, but it is many other things in reality.

It was also, as Gillingham says, the first truly global society, in that it drew people from everywhere -- Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas -- to create a crossroads of cultures unlike anything that had been seen before. It could also represent, for some people at some times, a "more inclusive version of the American dream."

Racism was of course present. The author points out that "viceregal Spain invented racial classification on supposedly scientific grounds, the first society to do so in history. From the sixteenth century on, Iberians spoke of raza, race, as the sum of inherited characteristics transmitted through blood, semen, and breast milk, and deployed it to determine where the Crown’s subjects should live, what jobs they could hold, what law codes they had to follow, and even what clothes they could wear," and yet these theories rarely survived contact with realities on the ground. Patrias chicas, little local homelands, were always more important than the idea on nationhood, and locals found ways to govern themselves even when the federal government was apathetic or downright hostile.

For example, says Gillingham:

"In Nohcacab, Yucatán, (where they) still enjoyed the vote, they would line up on election day to deposit ballots for whomever they were instructed to vote for and then go home and secretly, democratically, elect parallel and more real governments. Getting rid of those authentic governments
was difficult; it required a military force that the centralists didn’t possess; moreover, these were the powers that actually got important things done."

Despite its length and breadth, this volume was not a difficult read for me. Gillingham spices up the narrative with colorful vignettes of historical characters -- not just the powerful and famous, but the downtrodden and marginalized. One of my favorites was Catalina de Erauso, "who in the early seventeenth century escaped her Dominican convent, exchanged her habit for a man’s clothes, fought for the king on the Chilean frontier, murdered a man in Peru, got off in exchange for rejoining a convent, and ended up as a muleteer—a suitably difficult, hard-nosed, entrepreneurial job—in Mexico. She was rare because we know about her—she left behind something of an autobiography—and because she allegedly got a dispensation from the Pope to continue cross-dressing." This was a good reminder to me that history has always been full of the entire spectrum of human identities -- even those the mainstream tries to erase.

We see what we want to see. Bartolomé de las Casas, an early advocate for better treatment of the indigenous peoples, said in the 1500s: “When a man greatly desires something and fixes it firmly in his mind it is a wonder how all that he sees and hears, at every step, seems to confirm it." This could have been written about our media landscape today.

From Mexico's point of view, the U.S. does not look so much like a shining example of liberty. Europe doesn't look very good either. Gillingham makes a strong case many of the criticisms people level at Mexico -- constant violence, governmental dysfunction and corruption -- are no worse than in the States in many ways, and considering all the forms of imperialism and colonialism to which Mexico has been subjugated over five centuries, it is remarkable that it has survived and in some ways thrived. Perfect? Absolutely not. But its problems are not unique, nor are they so much worse than those in the U.S. when you consider how the U.S. looks from the Mexican point of view.

Anyway, this is a great survey of Mexican history and I'm glad I read it. If you are interested in learning world history from a too-often neglected perspective, or just interested in learning more about this beautiful multifaceted country, I would recommend it!

[G Flores · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that maybe doesn't need a Goodreads page, but I appreciate that it does. That is because this is a full on academic work whose primary appeal will be to researchers, grad students or normal people like me who want a seriously deep dive into Mexican history. On that front, it absolutely delivers.

What that means for the layman is that you can get 50-80 pages of fascinating history told at a strong clip followed by 50-80 pages of the dryer stuff: administration, governance, the state of the world and politics. A lot of this is interesting in its own way but more than a few readers will either skip large portions of this book or put it down altogether.

As a piece of academic-level nonfiction, Gillingham delivers an excellent work that is accessible to academics and provides a solid starting spot for further research. As a curio for the standard nonfiction reader, it might be a little too heavy and doesn't do much to try to appeal to a casual audience. It's an excellent work if you've got the dedication.

[Juanathang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mexico: A 500-Year History is a fantastic read for a wide audience, whether you’re interested in Mexico and its history, if you’re studying the region, or if you’re from the U.S. and would like to stop being ignorant on our southern neighbor. This book gives a great introductory summary of Mexican history, starting from just before the Spanish conquest and going up to current day and age. In this book, you’ll hear story of the “Many Mexicos”, the exceptionally diverse and wide ranging history, how the country has been pushed and pulled by the U.S. and other countries, and how it has responded. Mexico was arguably one of the first diverse globalized nations and has always been a major player in every chapter of history. You’ll learn about all of them, and more, in this book.

[Rafael Ramirez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entretenida narración que abarca la historia de México desde la conquista hasta la época moderna.

Es un texto interesante que, sin embargo, adolece de un claro sesgo del autor hacia una izquierda filo‑marxista, especialmente cuando intenta incorporar un análisis económico de los acontecimientos históricos que aborda (de hecho, Marx es el único economista notable citado en el libro, varias veces) y atribuye cualquier mejora en el bienestar de la población al gasto público y a los programas estatales. El texto incorpora, además, las preocupaciones típicas de la academia “woke” de la actualidad, como un énfasis excesivo en temas raciales y de género.

Es particularmente lamentable que el libro termine con un capítulo entero dedicado a la violencia relacionada con el narcotráfico, que en esencia repite el argumento del oficialismo mexicano al atribuir todo el problema a las políticas impulsadas por la administración del presidente Calderón, dando la impresión de que lo mejor para el país y la población habría sido la tolerancia y el acomodo oficial del gobierno con el crimen organizado. Es interesante que el libro se queda ahí y no llega a discutir el resultado del cambio de política en esa dirección con López Obrador, que ha convertido a México en un narcoestado.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly thick book but a page turner as well. I really enjoyed learning about the indigenous cultures of Mexico and how the country was somewhat progressive in that time period regarding everyone being recognized as a human being and being a place where people from all over the world came to. Gillingham does a remarkable job explaining that while Mexico has a violent history, it's also been a frontrunner for many good policies such as banning slavery earlier then the US, supporting women's rights (while suffrage is a different story), and focusing on education and healthcare, all while having to balance an overbearing northern neighbor. What the book does most strongly is to argue that Mexico has a lot of redeeming qualities that many other countries will look past and from the Mexican viewpoint the US and European countries have their own issues that they refuse to fix. I recommend this to anyone interested in the subject. My only gripe is some chapters jump around chronologically too much and it can throw you off. Also the author seems to love the word trebling.

[heptagrammaton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sharp, with clear prose, if somewhat thesaurus-mired in its adverbiage.

If there is such a thing as a definitive motive through Gillingham's 500-Year History, it is one of Mexico's enduring, irreducible idiosyncrasy often fundamentally defies certain set expectations of what a North American republic is/could/should have been. To speak just of the example 20th century, the title of another of Gillingham's books on Mexican history says enough: it names the PRI's single-party state a strange dictatorship.

   PS I am kind of egh about long national histories usually: by virtue of what they are artifically trimmed in all dimensions, they shove themselves in-between the territorial extension of a current nation states, they are either too cursory to satisfy anyone more closely familiar with the subject or too much for the rest to digest. On the other hand, they are just neat, you know?

   PPS On the other hand, (implying I've got three) national histories – trimmings and all – is how we primarily encounter history, in schoolrooms and parliamentary chambers, which may be the only way many of us encounter history. (I don't know what happens in the room where the sausage of nation- and/or statehood is made, but I know the historiographical trimmings are involved because they keep crunching.) So, the neatness is useful.

   ¬A/N {This review is originally based off my reading of a digital advanced reader's copy,
generously provided through NetGalley by the Altlantic Monthly Press.}

[Leonard Singer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The last chapter summarizes the futility and fumbling of the US “war on drugs” and its effect on Mexico.

[Jonathan Crain · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1511, a Spanish sailor named Gonzalo Guerrero washed ashore on the Yucatán coast. When his countrymen found him two decades later, he had become unrecognizable: tattooed, dark-skinned, married to a Maya woman, serving as a military adviser to indigenous lords. He refused rescue. Years later, he died fighting against Spanish forces, his final words an insistence that he still “remembered God.” Paul Gillingham opens 'Mexico: A 500-Year History' with Guerrero’s story—a founding irony that captures the book’s central claim. Mexico, from its first centuries, emerged as a place more hybrid than anywhere else in human history, built on the collision and mixing of hundreds of indigenous peoples with Iberians, West Africans, and Asians.

This hybridity forms the foundation for Gillingham’s ambitious reinterpretation of Mexican history. Across more than 750 pages, he dismantles myths that have shaped our understanding of the country’s origins and evolution. The “Conquest,” he argues, was no foreign invasion but a “vicious civil war” fought among indigenous peoples, with Spaniards serving as opportunistic allies rather than omnipotent conquerors. Tens of thousands—sometimes hundreds of thousands—of indigenous warriors destroyed the Mexica Empire. The Spanish merely provided a catalyst.

Gillingham turns the legend that Hernán Cortés was mistaken for the god 'Quetzalcóatl' on its head. He calls this story “clearly nonsense,” noting that Cortés never claimed such confusion and that the tale first appeared in writing a generation after the events, in 1555. The myth served dual purposes: it offered the defeated Mexica a supernatural explanation for their loss, and it gave Franciscan friars a theological justification for divine conquest. Each age, Gillingham observes, reinvents the war to suit its tastes. The weakness of historical sources—written by men who were geriatric, geographically removed, or self-interested—permits this endless revision.

The book challenges modern pieties as forcefully as colonial ones. Gillingham takes aim at 'mestizaje,' the nationalist celebration of racial mixing that became, in his analysis, an “ambiguous and loaded” tool of authoritarian liberalism. Twentieth-century elites championed a “post-racial Mexico” while secretly pursuing policies to whiten the population. Yet Gillingham refuses simple condemnation. The ideology may be suspect, but the reality remains: Mexico was the world’s greatest melting pot, a place where social and sexual mobility crossed supposedly strict racial boundaries. The gap between official ideology and lived experience—captured in the Spanish adage “Del dicho al hecho hay mucho trecho” (between word and fact there’s a big gap)—runs through the entire narrative.

This tension between rhetoric and reality shapes Gillingham’s structure. Rather than march through five centuries in chronological order, he builds what he calls a “series of stories with sliding panels.” The book intersperses chapters that outline a period with thematic essays that circle back, examining the same era from different angles—politics, economics, culture, violence. The method resembles a medieval palimpsest, Gillingham suggests, where different truths are “thrown down one upon the other, the one obliterating or perhaps supplementing another.”

The approach works best when it reveals contradictions that official histories obscure. Gillingham draws on notarial records, wills, land deeds, and town charters to show how indigenous communities maintained autonomy even where Spanish presence was strongest. Outside major cities, local governance persisted for centuries, accommodating destructive colonial policies while preserving older social relationships. The ideal of the municipio libre—the free municipality—remained a democratic principle that shaped Mexican political practice long after independence.

The structure demands patience. Readers expecting a straight chronological path may find themselves disoriented by the thematic loops. A chapter on viceregal governance gives way to one on trade routes, which yields to an analysis of racial hierarchies—all covering the same decades. At times, this method obscures more than it clarifies. The Revolutionary period, for instance, fragments across multiple chapters, making it harder to grasp the civil war’s trajectory. Yet Gillingham insists this complexity serves a purpose: it preserves the “hierarchy of reasons why things happened when they did,” preventing the flattening that simple narratives impose.

The book gains energy from Gillingham’s eye for human detail. He introduces us to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the seventeenth-century nun who turned her cell into a study and wrote Sapphic verses alongside terse condemnations of male sexual hypocrisy. We meet José Loess Aguayo, a 'pícaros' figure from 1747 whose life of petty theft and incarceration illustrates the political instability and lack of opportunity in mid-eighteenth-century Mexico. The War on Drugs becomes concrete through the 2017 murder of journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas, an assassination that epitomizes the “shadowy world of conspiracy, gossip, and fear” where most stories remain believable but few are provable.

Gillingham writes with bite. He describes one general as “a steak with eyes” and another as “Dracula.” The single-party state that emerged after the Revolution becomes a “competitive authoritarian regime,” a “part-time dictatorship”—what Mexicans themselves called a 'dictablanda.' When analyzing modern narco-violence, he refuses the comfort of simple categories, noting that we cannot know “how many Mexican policemen and American law enforcement agents were on the take.” The contemporary War on Drugs, he argues, looks “more like a civil war” fought on three fronts: cartels against cartels, cartels against the state, and cartels against civilians.

This contemporary material raises the book’s stakes. Gillingham positions current crises—corruption, violence, democratic fragility—as outgrowths of patterns five centuries old. The gap between law and practice, between democratic aspirations and boss rule ('caciquismo'), between revolutionary rhetoric and oligarchic reality persists. Yet so does resistance. Generations of Mexicans struggled to make their votes count, maintaining democratic ideals despite systemic violence and fraud. The theme that emerges is not conquest and submission but lives lived “in the face of empire,” people striving for freedom despite vast disparities of power.

Does the book justify its length? The question persists. At more than 750 pages, 'Mexico: A 500-Year History' includes extraordinary detail—perhaps too much for general readers. The colonial period receives deeper treatment than the twentieth century, which feels compressed despite its direct relevance to contemporary Mexico. Gillingham acknowledges his approach is “comprehensive and partial,” identifying key phenomena to explore in depth rather than attempting complete coverage. This selectivity serves his revisionist aims but leaves gaps. Women appear sporadically — exceptional figures like Sor Juana rather than representative lives. The northern frontier, unmapped until well after independence, remains shadowy.

Still, the book succeeds on its own terms. Gillingham set out to challenge generation-old stories and expose the complexity beneath nationalist myths. He delivers. His Mexico is not a nation conquered and then reborn through revolution, but a place built on continuous negotiation between central power and fierce local autonomy, between imported ideologies and indigenous persistence, between the script of formal law and the improvisation of daily life.

In the end, Gillingham offers not a tidier history but a truer one. His Mexico emerges from the collision of hundreds of peoples and the long struggle to forge something new from that collision—a struggle still going on today. The book refuses to treat the past as primitive or the present as inevitable. It insists we see Mexican history as what it is: many distinct stories of adaptation, resistance, and survival in the shadow of empire. That refusal to simplify, that insistence on complexity and contradiction as Mexico’s most profound truth, makes this history essential reading for anyone seeking to understand a nation too often flattened by colonial myths and nationalistic fairy tales.

This review is of an advance reader's edition provided by NetGalley and Grove Atlantic | Atlantic Monthly Press.

[Tommie Whitener · Rating 2 out of 5]

At page 426 of 613 I finally gave up. Just too many facts, figures, relationships, and details. May be a great book for the specialist but for me just planning a trip to Mexico and wanting to know more about the country, it was just too much. My one take-away: millions and millions dead from the days of the conquistadors to the revolutions of the 20th century. No wonder Mexico has a special holiday for the dead.

[Mike Hartnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a LOT. Head-spinning. I think if I have a quibble, it’s that it often felt like an attempt to squeeze every single event in rather than contextualizing them. The epilogue feels a bit like it’s asserting the thesis after the fact.

[Abram · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://open.substack.com/pub/abramre...

[Bill Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, there's this monumental oil painting 🎨 by celebrated landscape artist JOSÉ MARÍA VELASCO that I saw in a special exhibition devoted to his work at the MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART = the piece here: 'The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel (El Valle de México desde el Cerro de Santa Isabel)', 1877 👏



And I had just read Gillingham's marvelous book and I realized—the painting 🖌️ symbolically illustrates the 3 MAJOR ERAS OF MEXICAN HISTORY ⏳ that Gillingham explores so expertly ✍️ in his book:

+ THE INDIGENOUS PAST = in the foreground, the eagle 🦅—an animal with a key role in the founding myth of the Aztecs (who, by the way, called themselves not the Aztecs but rather the Mexica—hence the name of the country!)
+ SPANISH CONQUEST & COLONIZATION = in the middle ground, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe 🔔—important cuz the Spanish brought Catholicism with them, which quickly planted strong cultural roots—and the Virgin's appearance at this location is widely recognized as an important event in the establishment of Mexican identity
+ INDEPENDENCE & MODERNIZATION = in the background, Mexico City 🏢—a metropolis constructed at the direction of Spanish conquistadors at the site of the magnificent Aztec capital Tenochtitlan—which since Velasco's time has grown and expanded and has now swallowed almost every inch of terrain you see in his painting!—the capital now being the most populous city in the Americas

[Harry Barbee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because I have a genuine interest in learning about Mexican history, and this book truly delivers. I was impressed with how thorough the book is. Gillingham also does a fantastic job organizing the book into historical/cultural themes (versus only by time periods) such that the reader can digest an enormous amount of detail and understand how those details fit together within a larger narrative.

I walked away feeling like I had a much more well-rounded understanding of Mexican history. In fact, I even purchased some more books on Mexican history because it generated such curiosity in me.

The one challenge I had with the book is that there are MANY names (e.g. people, places, events) and specific details that can be hard to remember. I don’t view this as a shortcoming - after all, the book is a 500 year history! I say this because it provides important context for the reader. They should approach this book expecting to walk away with a new perspective on Mexico and its rich history, which will hopefully spark a curiosity that leads them to read more.

[Stephen D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mexico is quite an achievement in storytelling. 600 pages is actually not very much space to squeeze 500 years of history and Gillingham does with great dexterity and pacing. Most importantly, Mexico avoids becoming reductionist or a political screed while conveying the author's obvious fondness for his subject matter. It's not a perfect book, there are run on sentences and a few too many $2 words. The Mexican revolution gets a short shrift and the narco chapters are a jarring conclusion that don't quite have a through line to the rest of the work. But overall Mexico is well executed, thoughtful history that is worth reading

[Renee Wilmeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

At long last. This book was unnecessarily long and really 2 books in one. While incredibly well researched (and clearly the author is an expert), nearly half the book focused on 20th century history. While interesting, it wasn't what I'd hoped to get -- I was looking for more in depth coverage of Mexico's multiple independences especially in the 19th centuries. That said, if you're looking for a detailed historical, cultural, social, and political history of Mexico in the 20th and 21st centuries, this book can be a terrific resource.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was slightly overwhelmed to read this book. It promises a lot of history right in the title, and I felt like maybe I would be underprepared, but actually I think this was a really good introduction to a topic that I didn't know much about. I loved the writing style and while it might sound dry or dense, I found it very engaging. One of my favorite reads of the year.

Thanks for the ARC (sorry it took a bit to get through!)

[Carole Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mexico: A 500-Year History by Paul Gillingham is a sweeping, vivid account of a nation that has continually shape and been shaped by the wider world. Blending elegant storytelling with cutting-edge scholarship, Gillingham traces Mexico’s resilience, cultural hybridity, and political innovation across five centuries, revealing a country whose global influence and enduring spirit are impossible to overlook.

[Bryan Fichter · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author apparently spent a decade researching and writing this in-depth history of Mexico, and it shows. The book covers an immense amount of ground, from the arrival of Cortez all the way up to the drug wars of the 2000s. Gillingham does about a good a job as one could do in untangling the various civil wars that convulsed Mexico in the 1910s. He also refutes some of the stereotypes that a lot of Americans (including the current president) have about the country.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned quite a bit from this book about the peoples and lands that became Mexico. The violence, corruption, oppression, disease, greed, scandal, poverty, colonialism and racism that seem to have become embedded, accepted and almost defining of the culture was saddening to learn. The complicity and culpability of the Catholic Church for the conditions of the peoples and state of affairs over the centuries cannot be unnoticed.

[Shari]

During the chapters on the Mexican Revolution, I took a break and listened to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, the season on The Mexican Revolution. This really helped me flesh out the more academic aspects of the book. Also, one could buy this book for the bibliography alone, which is fascinating. I’m very glad to add this interesting book to my library. It’s a good primer on Mexico’s history since the conquest.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acclaimed and prize-winning historian Paul Gillingham, tells us the history of Mexico. If you have not learned about Mexico's history, you need to! One of my favorite classes in grad school was this history of Mexico. It is fascinating. This book was a great ride through the country and it’s very long history!

Thank you One World & NetGalley for the ARC! #Mexico #NetGalley

[RdeLT · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this excelent new history, the author narrates the story of the fall of the great Mexica Empire at the hands of the bloody Spanish army and the Indigenous rival armies of the Mexicas. The author argues that, though the Spanish won, they were not technically superior. There were many factors that led to the Mexica downfall. The author truly enlightens us with his non traditional point of view

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*
Good.
Sweeping but very digestible.
A little touchy.

[Jorge Guajardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loooved this door stopper of a book. Not only does it dispel many myths I grew up with, it contextualized other things that highlight the grandness of Mexico. A great read.

[Ben M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found myself underlining passages, not because they were flashy, but because they were precise. The author clearly values clarity over exaggeration.

[Sofia B · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am from Mexico. The worst part about this book, honesty, is the arrogance of the content, and of the one voice reads the audiobook. It was unbearable and a bit insulting.