This book presents the history of the Gomez, an elite family of Mexico that today includes several hundred individuals, plus their spouses and the families of their spouses, all living in Mexico City. Tracing the family from its origins in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico through its rise under the Porfirio Diaz regime and focusing especially on the last three generations, the work shows how the Gomez have evolved a distinctive subculture and an ability to advance their economic interests under changing political and economic conditions. One of the authors' major findings is the importance of...

This book is an attempt to demonstrate the analytical power of the holistic approach for understanding disasters. Six major earthquakes in Latin America are used as an example: the general idea is to place disasters in a broad social and regional context. Understanding disasters is a way of understanding the social system. The idea is to show that every major disaster is unique and different. Statistical methods may be useful for purposes of risk estimation but modern disasters are "systemic" and complex. In the chapter on the 2010 Chile earthquake we discuss the tsunami and why the system...