The Ride
Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Timed for the 250th anniversary of one of America’s most famous founding events: Paul Revere’s heroic ride, newly told with fresh research into little-known aspects of the story Americans have heard since childhood but hardly understood
On April 18, 1775, a Boston-based silversmith, engraver, and anti-British political operative named Paul Revere set out on a borrowed horse to fulfill a dangerous but crucial mission: to alert American colonists of advancing British troops, which would seek to crush their nascent revolt.
Revere was not the only rider that night, and indeed, he had completed at least 18 previous rides across New England and other colonies, disseminating intelligence about British movements. But this ride was like no other, and its consequences in the months and years to come—as the American Revolution morphed from isolated skirmishes to a full-fledged war—became one of our founding legends.
In The Ride, Kostya Kennedy presents a dramatic new narrative of the events of April 18 and 19, 1775, informed by fresh primary and secondary source research into archives, family letters and diaries, contemporary accounts, and more. Kennedy reveals Revere’s ride to be more complex than it is usually portrayed—a loosely coordinated series of rides by numerous men, near-disaster, capture by British forces, and finally success. While Revere was central to the ride and its plotting, Kennedy reveals the other men (and, perhaps, a woman with information about the movement of British forces) who helped to set in motion the events that would lead to America’s independence.
Thrillingly written in a dramatic, unstoppable narrative, The Ride re-tells an essential American story for a new generation of readers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Paul Revere's famous 1775 late-night journey to warn American colonists about approaching British forces was far from his first such ride, emphasizes bestselling biographer Kennedy (True) in this amusing and affectionate recounting of Revere's activist years before the Revolution. Kennedy presents Revere as essentially a laborer of the Revolution, writing that "Revere was not born into money. He received no high-shelf education. He spent less time pondering. He worked." Revere came into contact with the Revolution's early architects—John and Samuel Adams and John Hancock—through Boston high society, first as a prominent member of the Masons (prominent because he simply showed up to more meetings than anyone else, Kennedy suggests), and later in his capacity as a silversmith (but a bad one, leaving him ever in arrears). The passionate, cash-strapped, and notably athletic Revere was thus well positioned to help the Revolution with such arduous physical tasks as couriering messages, including a dozen or so rides predating the most famous one. Kennedy, whose previous biographies have all been of athletes, charmingly depicts Revere as somewhat of a jock among nerds (his riding prowess is much dissected), but he pads the narrative with unnecessarily detailed descriptions of routes and out-of-left-field pivots to pop science writers like Malcolm Gladwell. Still, it makes for a fresh and up-close look at Revolutionary Boston.
