Booklists: suggested reading

 

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Fiction and nonfiction titles centered around the Revolutionary War period and the birth of the United States.

 

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

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Fiction

• Treason
  Author: Nevin, David
  Publisher: Forge $ 27.95 ISBN: 0312855125 Date: 2001
  Kirkus Booklist
  From the bestselling author of Dream West : Three powerful men--James Madison, Aaron Burr, and General James Wilkinson--collide in a tale of treason that puts the future of the nation and its democracy at stake.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
  Updated 9/21/01
• Scandalmonger
  Author: Safire, William
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 27 ISBN: 0684867192 Date: 2000
  Library Journal
  Exploding any notion that political sex scandal is a recent phenomenon, our press-hounded Founding Fathers star in an outrageous - and fact-based - novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. Safire demonstrates how media intrusiveness into private lives and politicians' manipulation of the press are as old as the Constitution in this entertaining and thought-provoking historical novel.
  
• Rise to Rebellion
  Author: Shaara, Jeff
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 26.95 ISBN: 034542753x Date: 2001
  PW
  More than a powerful portrait of the people and purpose of the American Revolution, Rise to Rebellion is a fictionalized account of history's most pivotal events: The Boston Tea Party, the battle of Concord, and of Bunker Hill. The author of the bestselling Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure reveals with new immediacy how philosophers became fighters and how a scattered group of colonies became the United States of America.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
  Updated 5/17/01
• The Glorious Cause
  Author: Shaara, Jeff
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 29.95 ISBN: 0345427564 Date: 2002
  PW
  New York Times bestselling author Shaara brilliantly portrayed the origins of the American Revolution in Rise to Rebellion--now he continues the amazing saga of how thirteen colonies became one nation.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
  Updated 9.30.02

Nonfiction

• Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution
  Author: Blumrosen, Alfred W.
  Publisher: Sourcebooks $ 24.95 ISBN: 1402204000 Date: 2005
  Booklist
  This carefully documented, chilling history presents a radically different view of the profound role that slavery played in the founding of the republic, from the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution through the creation of the Constitution.
  Updated 6.9.05
• First American: The Life and Time of Benjamin Franklin
  by Brands, H.W.
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 35 ISBN: 0385493282 Date: 2000
  Kirkus PW
  This major biography of Benjamin Franklin presents previously unpublished letters to and by Franklin and includes recollections and anecdotes of Franklin's contemporaries.
  
  
• Alexander Hamilton
  Author: Chernow, Ron
  Publisher: Penguin $ 35 ISBN: 1594200092 Date: 2004
  Kirkus LJ Booklist
  From National Book Award winner Ron Chernow comes a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 6.9.05
• The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
  Author: Collins, Paul
  Publisher: Bloomsbury $ 24.95 ISBN: 1582345023 Date: 2005
  Kirkus
  The author of Sixpence House travels the globe piecing together the missing body and soul of one of America's most enigmatic founding fathers: Thomas Paine.
  Updated 7.25.05
• American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
  Author: Ellis, Joseph J.
  Publisher: Knopf $ 29.95 ISBN: 0679444904 Date: 1997
  Booklist
  A shrewd, spirited biography of our third president--one that abstains from both Jefferson worship and Jefferson bashing--American Sphinx shows readers the protean personality, the deep deviousness, the multiple voices that lent themselves so brilliantly to Jefferson's political career.
  Updated 6.9.05
• Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
  Author: Ellis, Joseph J.
  Publisher: Knopf $ 26.95 ISBN: 0375405445 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  From the author of American Sphinx, the award-winning biography of Thomas Jefferson, comes an illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic--John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.
  Updated 6.9.05
• His Excellency: George Washington
  Author: Ellis, Joseph J.
  Publisher: Knopf $ 26.95 ISBN: 1400040310 Date: 2004
  PW Booklist
  The author of seven highly acclaimed books, Joseph J. Ellis has crafted a landmark biography that brings to life in all his complexity the most important and perhaps least understood figure in American history, George Washington. With his careful attention to detail and his lyrical prose, Ellis has set a new standard for biography.
  
  Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the University of Virginia, Joseph Ellis paints a full portrait of George Washington’s life and career–from his military years through his two terms as president. Ellis illuminates the difficulties the first executive confronted as he worked to keep the emerging country united in the face of adversarial factions. He richly details Washington’s private life and illustrates the ways in which it influenced his public persona. Through Ellis’s artful narration, we look inside Washington’s marriage and his subsequent entrance into the upper echelons of Virginia’s plantation society. We come to understand that it was by managing his own large debts to British merchants that he experienced firsthand the imperiousness of the British Empire. And we watch the evolution of his attitude toward slavery, which led to his emancipating his own slaves in his will. Throughout, Ellis peels back the layers of myth and uncovers for us Washington in the context of eighteenth-century America, allowing us to comprehend the magnitude of his accomplishments and the character of his spirit and mind.
  
  When Washington died in 1799, Ellis tells us, he was eulogized as “first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Since then, however, his image has been chisled onto Mount Rushmore and printed on the dollar bill. He is on our landscape and in our wallets but not, Ellis argues, in our hearts. Ellis strips away the ivy and legend that have grown up over the Washington statue and recovers the flesh-and-blood man in all his passionate and fully human prowess.
  
  In the pantheon of our republic’s founders, there were many outstanding individuals. And yet each of them–Franklin, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison– acknowledged Washington to be his superior, the only indispensable figure, the one and only “His Excellency.” Both physically and politically, Washington towered over his peers for reasons this book elucidates. His Excellency is a full, glorious, and multifaceted portrait of the man behind our country’s genesis, sure to become the authoritative biography of George Washington for many decades. - Publisher Marketing.
  Updated 9.22.04
• Washington's Crossing
  Author: Fischer, David Hackett
  Publisher: Oxford $ 35 ISBN: 0195170342 Date: 2004
  Booklist Kirkus PW
  In a dramatic and colorful narrative of a pivotal moment in American history, we see how the campaign developed in a web of hard choices by many actors on both sides of the Delaware.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 2.5.04
• Washington's General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumpf of the American Revolution
  Author: Golway, Terry
  Publisher: Holt $ 26 ISBN: 0805070664 Date: 2005
  LJ
  Nathanael Greene is a Revolutionary War hero who has been lost to history. Golway examines how an overlooked Quaker from Rhode Island won the Revolutionary War's crucial southern campaign and helped to set up the final victory of American independence at Yorktown.
  Updated 2.7.05
• John Adams: Party of One
  Author: Grant, James
  Publisher: FSG $ 30 ISBN: 0374113149 Date: 2005
  PW
  In this acute examination of a paradoxical U.S. president, Grant examines this complex and often contradictory founding father in the most well-rounded and multifaceted portrait of Adams to date.
  Updated 6.6.05
• Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation
  Author: Isaac, Rhys
  Publisher: Oxford $ 30 ISBN: 0195159268 Date: 2004
  PW Kirkus
  In this long-awaited work, Isaac mines the diary of a Revolutionary War-era Virginia planter--and many other sources--to reconstruct his interior world as it plunged into turmoil.
  Updated 6.1.04
• Benjamin Franklin: A American Life
  Author: Isaacson, Walter
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 30 ISBN: 0684807610 Date: 2003
  PW
  Rescuing Benjamin Franklin from the clich of genial codger, this book celebrates the most interesting, advanced, and earthy of the founding fathers.
  Updated 6.6.05
• George Washington: The Founding Father
  Author: Johnson, Paul
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 19.95 ISBN: 006075365x Date: 2005
  Booklist
  Washington is seen as one of the most important authors of the Constitution, in addition to his pivotal leadership of the Revolutionary War and a magisterial executive in the formative years of the new United States. He was a moderate man of few words, but when he spoke, he was worth hearing.
  Updated 6.9.05
• Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
  Author: Kaye, Harvey J.
  Publisher: Hill & Wang $ 25 ISBN: 080908970x Date: 2005
  PW
  Showing how Paine turned Americans into radicals, the author presents the nation's democratic story with wit, subtlety, and, above all, passion. Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age.
  Updated 6.6.05
• Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York
  Author: Ketchum, Richard M.
  Publisher: Holt $ 30 ISBN: 08805061193 Date: 2002
  Booklist PW
  Updated 9.23.02
• Gerneral George Washington: A Military Life
  Author: Lengel, Edward G.
  Publisher: Random $ 29.95 ISBN: 1400060818 Date: 2005
  PW
  Updated 6.6.05
• John Adams
  by McCullough, David
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 35 ISBN: 0684813637 Date: 2001
  Kirkus Booklist PW
  In his first book since Truman, one of America's most distinguished and popular biographers breathes life into history with this compelling look at the second president of the United States, John Adams. More than just a biography, this book looks at the birth of a young republic and explores the extraordinary factors that transformed 13 colonies into a united nation.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
• 1776
  Author: McCullough, David
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 32 ISBN: 0743226712 Date: 2005
  Booklist PW Kirkus LJ
  Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Truman and John Adams, McCullough returns with the story of the Revolutionary War--a book certain to be another landmark in the literature of American history.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 4.5.05
• Benjamin Franklin
  Author: Morgan, Edmund S.
  Publisher: Yale $ 24.95 ISBN: 0300095325 Date: 2002
  Publishers Weekly
  Chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and as a best book for 2002 by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, and Publishers Weekly. A finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. The greatest statesman of his age, Benjamin Franklin was also a pioneering scientist, a successful author, the first American postmaster general, a printer, a bon vivant. In addition, he was a man of vast contradictions. This bestselling biography by one of our greatest historians offers a compact and provocative new portrait of America's most extraordinary patriot. - Publisher Marketing.
  Updated 7.3.02
• The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution
  Author: Schecter, Barnet
  Publisher: Walker $ 24 ISBN: 0802713742 Date: 2002
  Kirkus
  The Battle for New York tells the story of how the city became the pivot on which the American Revolution turned. The struggle for control of New York was by far the largest military venture of the Revolutionary War, involving almost every significant participant on both sides.
  Updated 7.3.02
• Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, And the Birth of America
  Author: Schiff, Stacy
  Publisher: Holt $ 30 ISBN: 0805066330 Date: 2005
  Booklist PW
  The Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin to France for the crowning achievement of his career, an eight-year mission that stands not only as Franklin's most vital service to his country but as the most revealing view of him during an unforgettable chapter of the Revolution.
  Updated 3.16.05
• John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy
  Author: Thomas, Evan
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 26.95 ISBN: 0743205839 Date: 2003
  Kirkus
  The author of an acclaimed biography of Robert Kennedy turns to another larger-than-life subject--a "Founding Fighter" who combined the revolutionary zeal of John Adams with the naval daring of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey--John Paul Jones, naval hero of the American Revolution.
  Updated 3.13.03
• Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire, 1776-1783
  Author: Weintraub, Stanley
  Publisher: Free $ 28 ISBN: 0743226879 Date: 2005
  PW
  This startling new history of the Revolutionary War, told for the first time from the perspective of both the colonists and the colonizers, demonstrates that for the Americans, it was a war of rebellion, for the British, it became their Vietnam.
  Updated 6.6.05
• An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
  Author: Wiencek, Henry
  Publisher: FSG $ 30 ISBN: 0374175268 Date: 2003
  PW
  In this groundbreaking work, Wiencek explores George Washington's engagement with slavery at every stage of his life--as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman. Washington's heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now readers see him in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.
  Updated 9.08.03
• Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism
  by Wilkins, Roger
  Publisher: Beacon $ 23 ISBN: 0807009563 Date: 2001
  PW
  A civil rights advocate and historian reconsiders life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as he looks at the lives of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others who forged a nation in which "all men are created equal" but whose property included African women, children, and men.