Revolutionary Roads
Searching for the War That Made America Independent...and All the Places It Could Have Gone Terribly Wrong
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In the ride-along tradition of Sarah Vowell, Tony Horwitz and Bill Bryson, this insightful history revisits the pivotal figures and key turning points of the American Revolutionary War.
Revolutionary Roads takes readers on a time-traveling adventure through the crucial places American independence was won and might have been lost. You’ll ride shotgun with Bob Thompson as he puts more than 20,000 miles on his car, not to mention his legs; walks history-shaping battlefields from Georgia to Quebec; and hangs out with passionate lovers of revolutionary history whose vivid storytelling and deep knowledge of their subject enrich his own. Braiding these elements together into a wonderfully entertaining whole – and with a reporter’s abiding concern for getting the story straight – he has written an American Revolution book like no other.
The Revolutionary War is one of the greatest stories in all history, an eight-year epic filled with self-sacrificing heroes, self-interested villains, and, more interestingly, all the shades of complex humanity in between. It boasts large-scale gambles that sometimes paid off but usually didn’t, as well as countless tiny, fraught tipping points like a misunderstood order in a South Carolina cow pasture that could have altered the course of the war. The drama is magnified when you consider what was at stake: the fate of a social and political experiment that would transform the world. Yet we don’t know this story as well as we should, or how easily the ending could have changed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Thompson (Born on a Mountaintop) mixes playful imagination and solid research in this episodic romp through the Revolutionary War. Among other turning points, Thompson highlights the Powder Alarm, a precursor to the confrontations at Lexington and Concord; the Battle of Bunker Hill, which was actually fought on Breed's Hill, where "building a redoubt... was like flipping the bird at the British Army"; and British general John Burgoyne's defeat in the Battle of Saratoga, "the Mother of All Turning Points." Elsewhere, Thompson recounts the Battle of Kings Mountain near the border of North and South Carolina, an "out-of-nowhere victory" for the patriots that "drove a stake through British hopes of mobilizing loyalists to win the war," and the crucial role played by the Marbleheaders, an interracial regiment of Massachusetts sailors and fishermen, in the battles of Brooklyn and Trenton. Throughout, Thompson enriches his well-chosen primary sources with entertaining profiles of museum curators and historical reenactors and down-home turns of phrase ("you can't swing a dead cat by the tail in Concord without hitting the home of a literary icon"). The result is an eclectic yet cogent and cohesive account of the American Revolution.
