The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

What this immense biography paradoxically proves is that it takes a major figure of major accomplishment to sustain a narrative of such length. The legendary Pancho Villa could barely sustain such tonnage; the real one--a slippery, semi-literate, largely nonpolitical outlaw whose opportunities on the national stage were inglorious and brief--can't. Katz, a University of Chicago professor of Latin American history and author of The Secret War in Mexico, has extracted every milligram of fact to weigh against the legendary life. Villa emerges as one thuggish upstart among many, who happened to enter American consciousness by invading a sliver (Columbus, N.Mex.) of the lower 48--the only time that had happened since the War of 1812--and afforded Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing the opportunity for an inconsequential but romanticized ""Punitive Expedition."" Although a charismatic leader, Villa did not make much of his (brief) control of revolutionary Chihuahua, and, in fact, the scourge of the landowner class ended his life as a hacendado. Bought off with someone else's confiscated land in 1920, he lived on this once grand estate of 163,000 acres until assassins got him in 1923 at the age of 45. Having deflated the legendary Villa, this description of the sleazy, sanguinary Mexico of pillagers and predators seems an extremely long footnote to history. 20 illustrations. (Dec.)