The Friends of Pancho Villa

Book excerpt: The award-winning author blends fact and fiction to bring the Mexican Revolution to life in a “harrowing and brutal tale” of its famous leader (Rocky Mountain News). Waged from 1910 to 1920, the Mexican Revolution profoundly transformed Mexican government and culture. And Pancho Villa was its “incarnation and its eagle of a soul”—so says Rodolfo Fierro, the narrator of The Friends of Pancho Villa, an ex-con, train robber, and Villa’s loyal friend. Killers of men and lovers of life, the revolutionaries fought for freedom, for a new Mexico, and for Villa himself. In return, they shared victory and death with their country’s most powerful hero. “Frankly describing the murder, betrayal and deceit that turned a revolution against dictatorship into a civil war,” the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author of The Ways of Wolfe delivers a masterpiece of ferocious loyalty, bloody revolution, and legends that live forever (Publishers Weekly). “One of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” —Entertainment Weekly “This is not for the faint of heart, but then, neither is revolution.” —Publishers Weekly