Paul Record is an American who went to southeastern Mexico to hunt and ended up as a landowner, having married a Mexican girl and raised a family. This is an account of some of his adventures—tales of vengeance, bloodshed, and frontier justice. He is obviously no anthropologist. But I think that he gets closer to the essence of things Mexican than many a scholar who has taken all of the requisite methods courses and who sports his doctoral degree. He makes a very surprising but logical ease for Mexico’s milpa (slash and burn) corn cultivation. We may need to amend our lecture notes about this supposedly wasteful agricultural practice. Best of all, Record tells a whopping good story. His book deserves to stay in print a long time; maybe someday it will be read by students together with Flandrau’s Viva México.

Editorial nitpicking: Somewhere in Don Alfredo Knopf’s establishment there must be an editor who knows Spanish fairly well. But too many of the Borzoi books omit accents or put them on the wrong syllables and have Spanish words hyphenated after a consonant, instead of before, and between the double-Ls and Rs. Here, for example, we find Maria, Gomez, Sanchez, Lopez, Garcia, and Geronima all without accents. It would be well if corrections could be made in subsequent editions of Record’s fine book.