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.
