Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906 – 2001

There are so many good things to say about Courage Tastes of Blood that I have puzzled over how to economize in writing this review. The book is an epochal story of over one hundred years of struggle for land and justice by Mapuche people in southern Chile. In places it reads like a memoir and in others like a novel, but tragically, the tales it tells are nonfiction, or at least as close to nonfiction as a history conceived as “collective ethnography” — based on multiple complex, and often antagonistic, memories — can be (p. 20). Mallon relies on extensive archival research, oral histories, fieldwork, and repeated visits to coastal Cautín province — a place that no longer exists administratively but where I lived with my wife as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-1960s — in order to craft a truly powerful microhistory woven within a bigger Chilean...