"The Years of Blood, Alma Guillermoprieto's third collection of journalistic publications, brings together two decades of the author's investigations into the politics, culture, and history that paint the vast landscape of Latin America. Guillermoprieto reflects on interviews with people mixed up in the fray of killings, kidnappings, drug trafficking, and rape in order to provide context for and lend understanding to events that often appear shrouded in opacity. The collection follows a southward, geographical descent. It begins with Guillermoprieto's writings on Mexico, wherein the author considers topics as far ranging as the art of making tamales to the endemic disappearances of women in the region. From there it passes through Central America and offers insight into the fraught entanglements of the Nicaraguan dictatorship and the rise of gang violence in El Salvador. Finally, The Years of Blood finishes its journey in South America, with Guillermoprieto's reflections on Hugo Chávez's presidency in Venezuela and the massacre in El Salado, Colombia at the turn of the new millennium. While Guillermoprieto draws out common threads in these different situations-such as the deleterious effects of Nixon's War on Drugs in rural and poverty-stricken regions of the southern hemisphere-the book is, above all, a testament to the generativity of refusing to turn away from the everyday violence that surrounds us and committing to the work of interrogating even that which seems to defy our understanding"--