Now here’s an iUniverse book well worth the twenty dollars they charge for a paperback. It hardly matters that the title’s annual Mexican and Mexican-American commemoration of an 1862 Mexican whipping of the French army is dealt with in the first forty pages. The rest of the 278-page book, which I found hard to put down for long, is about Napoleon III’s attempted takeover of Mexico while we were busy fighting our Civil War–until the Mexicans, with some post-war help from us, finally drove them out in 1867.
I never knew how inept the French commanders were, though Mexican president Juarez and his loyalists would have been tough adversaries for any invader. I knew "Emperor" Maximilian was out of his element, but not that he was that foolish–or that his more realistic wife had a nervous breakdown. Arranged as a series of vignettes, the book is full of colorful details often missing from the dry histories. For instance, there is the former colonel of a New York regiment of Union volunteers who almost was executed with Maximilian, until the colonel’s wife talked Juarez into sparing him. Things like that make the book a very entertaining adventure, as well as a respectable footnoted history. It also has a nice bibliography for further exploration. Except for a few typos, a misleading blurb on the back cover, and some minor needless repetition, Austin author Donald W. Miles’ work is a great read.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 