Arthur, Anthony

General Jo Shelby's March

Random House:
New York: 2010
First edition, Hardcover, New in dust jacket,
265 pp
Cover artwork by: David Stevenson

It ain’t Harry Turtledove, but it might read like it. “General Jo Shelby had been a daring and ruthless cavalry commander, renowned and notorious for his slashing forays behind Union lines. After Appomattox, Shelby, declaring that he would never surrender, headed for Mexico. With three hundred men, some from his fighting ‘Iron Brigade’ regiment, others adventurers, fortune hunters, and deserters, the man Arthur refers to as ‘the last holdout of the Confederacy’ made the treacherous twelve-hundred-mile trip. In thrilling and vivid detail, General Jo Shelby’s March describes the dusty and dangerous trek through a lawless Texas swarming with desperadoes, into a Mexico teeming with Juárez’s rebels and marauding Apaches. After near fratricide among his fraying band of brothers, Shelby arrived to present a quixotic proposal to Emperor Maximilian: He and his fellow Americans would take over the Mexican army and, after being reinforced by forty thousand more Confederate soldiers, the government itself. Though a dramatic, doomed, and brave endeavor, Shelby’s actions changed both himself and American history forever.”   #44667