Political and cultural histories of Mexico prior to, during, and following the Revolution of 1910 abound. In most of these histories, ideas about material progress and capitalist development, as well as changes to the built environment, are present but often relegated to a tertiary position in narrative and analysis. Moreover, the historiography of the Revolution and its aftermath tends to be told from a confined national perspective, despite a recent scholarly current to globalize its actors and significance. It is for these reasons that Justin Castro’s Apostle of Progress is a welcome addition to historical scholarship. By following the life story of Modesto Rolland, one of twentieth-century Mexico’s leading engineers, inventors and thinkers, this book highlights many of the most underexplored aspects of the revolution and the period of reconstruction through about 1946: the political reformism of followers of Francisco Madero, the Constitutionalist revolutionaries’ progressive vision and influential reach into U.S. intellectual and political circles, the “socialist” experimentation in states such as Yucatán, the role of the technocrat in spurring post-revolutionary reconstruction, and the challenge of bringing peripheral regions into the national fold. Rolland’s influence was seemingly everywhere, making him the ideal subject of such a biography. He cut his teeth in Mexico City, introducing construction with reinforced concrete and playing a pivotal role in the gradual “Mexicanization” of U.S.-controlled railways, before being driven into exile after the reactionary Victoriano Huerta ousted Madero in 1913. One of the more fascinating chapters is when Castro discusses Rolland’s role in convincing U.S.-American liberals and progressives to back Venustiano Carranza and his “constitutionalists” over Villa and Zapata. This is the apex of global Progressivism, and Castro does a fantastic job situating Rolland in these discussions about governance, city planning, agrarian reform and taxation policies, as well as the early feminist movement. An acolyte of Henry George, Rolland persistently called for a land-value tax and a national land distribution to smallholders in order to resolve Mexico’s obdurate “agrarian problem.” He put put some of these ideas into practice under Salvador Alvarado’s “socialist” experiment in Yucatán in 1916 and 1917. Learning from municipal-level progressivism emphasizing democratic referenda and public health improvements in the U.S. and Ebenezer Howard’s garden city theories, Rolland tirelessly advocated for democratic municipal governance and, working in Xalapa, proposed a new city design centered on a stadium and surrounding worker neighborhoods. An unbending believer in capitalist development, albeit without an overbearing U.S. corporate presence, Rolland was instrumental in establishing the free port trading system, railroad construction connecting Yucatan to Mexico City, opening up the isthmus of Tehuantepec to extractivism, fostering the expansion of radio networks, and constructing infrastructures to peripheral areas, including his home territory (now a state) Baja California Sur.