All the magazines I read (The Week, The Atlantic, New Yorker) and the Sunday New York Times Bk. Review are talking about the new first volume of a trilogy on the Revolutionary War, just published.
The Title is THE BRITISH ARE COMING, The War for America Lexington to Princeton 1775 to 1777 by Rick Atkinson.
Having read all the reviews stopped me from doing a charitable thing. I was trying to cut back on my book clutter by donating my Revolutionary War History books and period books to the Revolutionary Roundtable, and my Civil War History books and period books to Old Baldy, Civil War Roundtable, but then I read the review listed above and I couldn't let my books go. I felt that I would get newly fascinated and miss my books after reading this new one.
Once before, when I moved from Philadelphia to New Jersey, I let all my previously acquired books from when I lived in New Jersey, go. Then over the years, I ended up buying a lot of them back. For instance, in 1970 I bought the WPA Guide to New Jersey and I have since bought it back three times! Sometimes you are in love with a subject, then you move on, never expecting to fall back in love with that subject again and HISTORY is a subject I have been in love with for a long time.
Although my current History Passion is World War II and I have just bought the biography of Martha Gellhorn, the first woman to go shore at Normandy Beach in the DDay invasion (she sought transport aboard a Red Cross ship, I may very well be brought back into the Revolutionary fold when I read Atkinson's book. What sold me on his book was its comparison with Tolstoy in The Week book review: "...he brings a Tolstoyan view of War insisting that we see how people on the ground experienced the unfolding violence." They had me at "Tolstoyan" as War and Peace has been one of my lifelong favorite Great EPICS! of war along with Gone With the Wind and Dr. Zhivago - all broad views that kept the individual man and woman on the street within he picture. I am thrilled and can't wait to read this new book.
I may also be forced to buy his trilogy on World War II which won a Pulitzer Prize.
Perhaps I have mentioned this before, but in a somewhat sporadically unhappy childhood and similarly often sad adolescence, books and cats were my salvation (not forgetting my dog friends). I could escape unhappy situations or painful emotions by traveling into different lives and times and getting a whole new perspective on both danger and survival. Any wisdom I may have, I learned through books.
Happy Trails!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com
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