Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* This balanced, elegantly written, and massively researched volume is the first in a projected trilogy about the Revolutionary War, which follows Atkinson's Liberation trilogy about WWII, the premier volume of which (An Army at Dawn, 2002) won a Pulitzer Prize in History. Combining apt quotation (largely from correspondence) with flowing and precise original language, Atkinson describes military encounters that, though often unbearably grim, are evoked in vivid and image-laden terms. Beginning with Concord and Bunker Hill, and including the subsequent British victory at the Battle of Brooklyn Heights and occupation of Manhattan, he covers the beginning of the war, through the startling American victories at Trenton and Princeton. Besides military operations per se, Atkinson comprehensively covers related phenomena such as recruitment (and desertion), transit (and logistics), provisioning (food and ammunition), imprisonment and recreation, and physical conditions, including weather and prevalent diseases such as smallpox. His profiles of American and English (and allied Hessian) statesmen and soldiers are fair and sharply etched. His treatment of the elderly Benjamin Franklin, especially his diplomacy in Paris, is masterful and funny. Benedict Arnold, at this point in the narrative, emerges strongly as a brilliant officer and an American hero. The portrait of the omnipresent George Washington foreshadows his skills and later great accomplishments. Aided by fine and numerous maps, this is superb military and diplomatic history and represents storytelling on a grand scale. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
The British Are Coming
Six years ago, Rick Atkinson published The Guns at Last Light, the final volume of his brilliant, award-winning Liberation Trilogy, a narrative history of Americans in combat during World War II. This month, Atkinson returns with The British Are Coming, the first volume of the Revolution Trilogy, a history of the American Revolutionary War. This book is, in a word, fantastic. It offers all the qualities that we have come to expect from the author: deep and wide research, vivid detail, a blend of voices from common soldiers to commanders, blazing characterizations of the leading personalities within the conflict and a narrative that flows like a good novel.
The British Are Coming begins in 1775 with the lead-up to the battles of Lexington and Concord and ends in January 1777 after the battles of Trenton and Princeton. Many of us have heard of these places, and some of us have visited them. One of the many virtues of Atkinson's skill as a researcher and writer is that he is able to strip away contemporary accretions and give readers a tactile sense of those times and lands.
Few of the Founding Fathers appear in these pages; they are off in Philadelphia writing their declarations and acts of the Continental Congress. But Ben Franklin, nearing 70, makes an arduous winter journey to Quebec as the Americans try and disastrously fail to split Canada away from Great Britain. Then there is Henry Knox, an overweight bookseller who turns out to be a brilliant artillery strategist. And the brothers Howe, leaders of the British Army and Navy, waver between punishing their enemies and treating them lightly to coax them back into the arms of the mother country.
Towering above them all is George Washington, famous for his physical grace and horsemanship. During much of this time, he is such a failure that some officers plot against him, and he fears being dismissed as the military leader. Under his leadership, the army retreats again and again and again. The enemy mocks Washington, ironically calling him "the old fox." He must beg soldiers to stay when their enlistments expire. He endures.
One of this book's great achievements is that it gives readers the visceral sense of just how much the American forces endured. It's moving to read accounts from soldiers who slept on the snow and frozen ground with their bare feet to a fire, then rose and marched without shoes or jackets to cross the icy Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 to rout British-paid mercenaries in Trenton. The British Are Coming is a superb ode to the grit and everyday heroism that eventually won the war.
Copyright 2019 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian shifts his focus from modern battlefields to the conflict that founded the United States.Atkinson (The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, 2013, etc.) is a longtime master of the set piece: Soldiers move into place, usually not quite understanding why, and are put into motion against each other to bloody result. He doesn't disappoint here, in the first of a promised trilogy on the Revolutionary War. As he writes of the Battle of Bunker Hill, for instance, "Charlestown burned and burned, painting the low clouds bright orange in what one diarist called ‘a sublime scene of military magnificence and ruin,' " even as snipers fired away and soldiers lay moaning in heaps on the ground. At Lexington, British officers were spun in circles by well-landed shots while American prisoners such as Ethan Allen languished in British camps and spies for both sides moved uneasily from line to line. There's plenty of motion and car nage to keep the reader's attention. Yet Atkinson also has a good command of the big-picture issues that sparked the revolt and fed its fire, from King George's disdain of disorder to the hated effects of the Coercive Acts. As he writes, the Stamp Act was, among other things, an attempt to get American colonists to pay their fair share for the costs of their imperial defense ("a typical American…paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes, compared to the average Englishman's twenty-five shillings"). Despite a succession of early disasters and defeats, Atkinson clearly demonstrates, through revealing portraits of the commanders on both sides, how the colonials "outgeneraled" the British, whose army was generally understaffed and plagued by illness, desertion, and disaffection, even if "the American army had not been proficient in any general sense." A bonus: Readers learn what it was that Paul Revere really hollered on his famed ride. A sturdy, swift-moving contri b ution to the popular literature of the American Revolution. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
In this first volume of the "Revolution Trilogy," Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson (
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Pulitzer Prize winner Atkinson (