Generations of Monarch butterflies regularly migrate from Mexico to Canada and back again. Ancient Native Americans had trade relationships that connected tribes in British Columbia to settlements throughout the Mississippi Valley. From outer space, North America appears as a unified mass of land, but it's split into three of the largest countries in the world, each founded by Europeans who disposed of the native population, whether through conquest, treaty, alliance, or miscegenation. New York Times reporter Anthony DePalma compares and contrasts the histories of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. in Here, a book that uses the sundry social crises of the '90s as a jumping-off point for an analysis of the three nations' interdependence. DePalma began the decade as the Times' correspondent in Mexico and ended as their man in Canada, which gives him a unique perspective on such front-page items as the U.S.'s fiscal bailout of Mexico, the referendum on Quebec independence, and the tight elections in all three countries in 2000. When DePalma writes about his personal experiences interviewing world leaders—or the hassles his family underwent as resident visitors on foreign soil—his insider's tone makes the recent past as absorbing as an after-dinner chat. DePalma also has a historian's gift for finding purpose and connection among events rarely mentioned in high-school textbooks, which enables him to dig up the roots of Canadian and Mexican mistrust of the U.S. in border skirmishes that most Americans have long forgotten. But DePalma falters in his in-depth reporting about the politicians and dissidents that shaped the course of the North American '90s. He has plenty of facts, but the personable air he uses to recount his own story is replaced by a drier, more objective reporter's style. Those more leaden passages aside, Here has a strong, coherent take on the ways in which the proximity of cultures leads to a natural tempering (and occasional sweetening) of each. And DePalma's most compelling argument holds that the foreign policy of the 21st century will be dictated by business agreements, not by military necessity. In this model, NATO is less historically important than NAFTA, which redrew maps into zones of economic opportunity, and is thereby brushing away the quests for land and self-definition that have made intracontinental diplomacy so unnaturally standoffish.