This book focuses on the local history of Tarrazú, a town located about 43 miles from Costa Rica's capital city. Carmen Kordick offers a long local history in global perspective, one that begins in 1821 and goes up to the present, making connections between the town and its townspeople (Tarrazuceños), Costa Rica's national history, and international changes. The Saints of Progress is divided into seven chapters and is based on Kordick's extensive archival research and oral history interviews with dozens of informants in Tarrazú and New Jersey. In the introduction, Kordick promises that Tarrazú's history can “present a more adequate and textured national narrative” that will allow the reader “to redraw Costa Rica's historical map,” to question “Costa Rica's exceptionalist national mythology,” and to reinterpret the 1948 civil war in a way that shows how the country's “current democratic system and its armyless state are rooted in the events of 1948 that unfolded in Tarrazú” (pp. 3–5).Chapter 1 traces the construction of Tarrazú as a town to the 1820s, when the first family arrived to the region, and then charts the arrival of other migrants. Chapter 2 is devoted to coffee mill owner Tobías Umaña Jiménez's economic success in Tarrazú during the 1930s and 1940s. Chapter 3 sheds light on the violent practices in Tarrazú from the 1930s to the 1950s; it explores cantinas and how masculinity was shaped among drunken men. Then the author analyzes how women and children lived under patriarchal violence in the home. Kordick corroborates that alcohol, gender, and power played the central roles in defining manhood.In chapter 4, the author examines political activity in Tarrazú during the 1940s to understand why many locals supported José Figueres's rebellion, which led to the civil war in March–April 1948. She convincingly demonstrates that caudillo León Cortés enjoyed major local support during the 1944 presidential election while also arguing that Tarrazú's men considered suffrage as part of their masculinity, confronting politicians who were likely to limit their access to the franchise. Although interesting, this last assertion is ahistorical. Indeed, Kordick repeats an old claim by Figueres's supporters that they rebelled because of electoral fraud and to protect the 1948 presidential election ballots, which was just an official post–civil war statement meant to justify an evitable, unnecessary revolution.Chapter 5 shows life in Tarrazú during and after the civil war. The author aims to demonstrate that the reference to Costa Rica as a peaceful country appeared between the 1960s and 1980s, when this country received refugees who were escaping from civil wars in Central America. One might wonder why Kordick supports this claim by references to official school textbooks—for example, “As scholars focused on the 1948 demilitarization, they began reexamining Costa Rican history in such a way as to emphasize a tradition of peace. Thus . . . the authors of a 1988 textbook declare that Costa Rica's commitment to peace dates back to the republic's first president, Juan Mora Fernández”—rather than by presenting how Costa Rica's professional historians have already analyzed the invention since the 1820s of national identity and revealed its myths, including Steven Palmer, V. H. Acuña Ortega, and Iván Molina Jiménez, among others (p. 123). Also, Kordick's assertion that Costa Rica's democracy emerged in 1948 reproduces the official, sanitized discourse that Figueres's political party, the Partido Liberación Nacional, used to justify the civil war and to create a grandiose image of its political caudillos in order to win elections from 1953 to 2002.Chapter 6 studies migration from Tarrazú to New Jersey since the 1960s and explores race relations in Tarrazú's current coffee mills by showing how Ngöbe-Buglé migrants are seen by locals. Chapter 7 shows Tarrazuceños' life in Paterson, New Jersey, to reveal how migrants have re-created a little Costa Rica through their consumption practices and living spaces. It describes many moments when Costa Rican émigrés had to deal with race and class in New Jersey.Kordick's book is interesting and original when she does local history in Tarrazú and New Jersey (in chapters 3, 6, and 7). But when this book ignores important historical works that already examine the questions that she is asking, it reproduces the problems of the official national history. Kordick's use of Tarrazú as a key case for confronting the national narrative does not work well, since it only inscribes local events into national ones. The thesis that the image of Costa Rica as a peaceful nation appeared during the period from the 1960s to the 1990s and that pre-1948 Costa Rica was not different from the other Central American countries is completely wrong. Costa Rica's difference discourse—a peaceful country, with a purportedly white population, that was democratic and socially classless, in contrast with the rest of Central America—had already appeared as a rhetorical tool in the nineteenth century and has been overused by Costa Rica's politicians and intellectuals since then. The Cold War context was different for Costa Rica not because of the social reform that occurred earlier but because many US officials and scholars believed in this country's difference (D. G. Munro, for instance) and because Costa Rica was able to use that image to deal with imperialism.