This beautifully packaged, at times compellingly written, sometimes uneven book is a marvel of historical investigation. Blunders abound on both sides by shifting perspectives between the rebels and their British oppressors, Atkinson allows the fog of war to serve almost as a character unto itself. The fact that by book’s end (this first volume of what will be an Atkinson trilogy on the American Revolution covers 1775 to 1777) the rebels have reached a sort of stalemate and have not been defeated across the 13 colonies is due primarily to a series of stunning British miscalculations. It’s often terrified soldiers are led by the ineffectual, the self-interested, and the deceitful. His remarkably thorough research reveals a Continental Army that was often hapless, frightened, and under-resourced. In his latest work, The British Are Coming, Rick Atkinson does not expose this myth so much as blow it up. Led by sage strategists named Knox, Montgomery, and Washington, this army fights like hell against an organized, trained, and massive military machine. What these amateurs lack in materiel they made up for in spirit. The tale of the American Revolutionary War, one of our nation’s most enduring and romantic narratives, goes something like this: overtaxed farmers, blacksmiths, and millhands, yearning for divined liberty, exchange shovels, hammers, and chisels for muskets. With man's blood paint the ground, gules, gules A Savage Birth: In “The British Are Coming,” Rick Atkinson Lays Bare the Myth of the American Revolution
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