Rick B. (bup) - , reviewed on 4/13/2011 + 166 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

Just an interesting way to slice history - I don't know if it's vertically, or horizontally, or what, but rather than make it about a person, or about one historical phenomenon, make it about a historical phenomenon artificially sliced by year. That appealed to me.

Well, that's not what he did, of course. The book opens in October 1775, with King George III's address to Parliament, and ends in the first days of 1777, with a sprinkling of the British hearing about Washington's year-end successes around Trenton.

It's basically the story of what George Washington did over his summer vacation during 1776, which opened with a siege of Boston (how surreal is that? On January 1, 1776, Boston was occupied by a foreign power, New York was a town on the southern end of 'York Island,' and Vermont was the Wild West), and ended with his freezing, starving army having been chased from one end of New Jersey to the other.

So it's the feel-good, crystalized portion of the miracle of the American Revolution.

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