Pablo Piccato argues convincingly that masculine honor and violence helped create a public sphere in nineteenth-century Mexico. Violence and reputation may seem antithetical to a notion of a public sphere as theorized by Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others, but Piccato asks his reader to consider a public sphere in Mexico as something uniquely Mexican. Violence, shame, and the not-always-so-free exchange of ideas and opinion characterized Mexico’s public sphere during the second half of the nineteenth century. A grammar of violence, in the duel, offered public men a legitimate method to defend honor, influence public opinion, and sometimes provide a bloody afterword to rational-critical debate. What the Mexican public sphere had in common with Europe was its steady exclusion of women and the poor, as liberalism and republicanism triumphed in the century of Juárez and Díaz.The era of the Restored Republic (1867 – 76) ushered in heady times as a new breed of men who lacked military experience but nurtured literary gravitas emerged as enlightened and progressive public intellectuals. Journalists sought honores as they participated in the rational-critical debate so instrumental to a Habermasian public sphere. Yet the political rhetoric was tempered with emotion and romanticism that tied the debater’s honor and reputation to his conscience and self-esteem. These hombres de palabra honed their expressions of emotion and passion, emboldened by their right to communicate public opinion. Honor was the glue that kept it all together and allowed journalists to write editorials with near impunity. They embraced a bohemian life, cavorting with lower-class men and women in working-class drinking establishments, and rejected materialism in all its forms. Indeed these men felt they had the honor and truthfulness to speak for the public. Their masculine honor as public men required constant vigilance to meet every attack with counterattack and when necessary a bullet or sword thrust on the field of honor. Press juries supported them, rarely punishing them for their journalistic sparring or slander against like public men. They rushed into political debates and in effect contributed to state building in republican Mexico. Piccato infuses the story of this emerging public with verve and animated language.Whereas honor may have protected journalists during the Restored Republic and Porfirio Díaz’s first term, Piccato shows beautifully how the very conception of honor transformed. The Mexican Penal Code of 1871 reoriented judges to rethink honor as a “juridical good” at the same time that Díaz strangled public debate. “Ultrajes a funcionarios públicos” became an effective criminal category that allowed judges to sanction journalists for impugning the reputations of public officials, especially after press juries were abolished in 1882. What constituted freedom of speech changed as the law code gave judges and courts wide latitude to censor and punish the press and offered a venue for the popular classes and women to defend their honor. At the same time that honor became a guaranteed right of every Mexican, it was used against journalists who criticized government policies. Although the popular classes and women had no political voice in the bourgeois public sphere, their presence defending their right to honor as Mexicans contributed to the ongoing conception of what citizenship would entail in future decades. To have one’s honor or reputation sullied could impact one’s ability to earn a livelihood. Hence a slur uttered in a stairwell or a marketplace not only harmed one’s sense of self but one’s public reputation, and Mexicans of all classes sought legal redress to restore their self-esteem and social capital.In sum, Piccato’s The Tyranny of Opinion is a scholarly masterpiece that chronicles the rise and transformation of the public sphere in nineteenth-century Mexico and the role of masculine honor in its creation. As any good study should, The Tyranny of Opinion also provokes new questions. Although combat journalists are Piccato’s focus, I wonder if analysis of some of the nineteenth century’s female journalists would add to the story. The female writers of Las Hijas de Anáhuac (1873) and Violetas de Anáhuac (1887 – 89) did not challenge the government or each other but certainly contributed to public opinion about women. Indeed, the editor of Violetas, Laureana Wright de Kleinhans, was admitted to several mostly male literary societies in the late nineteenth century and she would go on to write a history of notable Mexican women. Perhaps their example provided later female combat journalists like Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza and Dolores Jiménez y Muro an autonomous space to influence public opinion on the eve of Revolution.