A Mestizo is a person of mixed blood - specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry. Historian Serge Gruzinski here offers a critique of colonization and globalization. Looking at the 15th century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the melange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual and a phenomenon we now call globalization.

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon is built around a bizarre historical event and an off-hand challenge. The event? In December 1840, nearly twenty years after his death, the remains of Napoleon were returned to Paris for burial--and the next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men who claimed to be Napoleon. The challenge, meanwhile, is the claim by great French psychiatrist Jean-Etienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840) that he could recount the history of France through asylum registries.
From those two components, Laure Murat embarks on an...