The Mexican Centaur: An Intimate Biography of Pancho Villa

The Mexican Centaur, Oren Arnold's finest book - and he has written at least eighty - has been half a lifetime in the making. His researches on Pancho Villa began at El Paso, Texas, in 1925, not long after Villa's assassination. Arnold interviewed various of Villa's cavalrymen, various of his women, and many of his children. He has handled Villa's weapons, tried on his uniforms, and touched old scars on wounds suffered by members of Villa's brigdes. He regards Pancho Vill as a peerless leader of men. In depicting Villa from the inside out, Arnold performs a feat that became possible only after he had completely mastered his subject from the outside in - only after he had absorbed everything of consequence written by others about his subject and in the process had sparated much chaff of wheat. Yet this sifting was merely the preliminary to writing, for it is the subject's soul that must be reached , understood, respected, and finally loved., before an author's words can represent imperishable his subject's moods, thoughts, and actions. Arnold over the decades of his researches and reflections, attained this total rapport with Villa - both the outer and the inner man. Although The Mexican Centaur hence reads like the most powerful sort of fiction, it is not - it is villa.