Alia Kord's Reviews > 1776

the year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.

In the past year I've read biographies of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Certainly aspects of this story were familiar to me, but the focus on one man in the course of a lifetime doesn't allow for a lot of the details of events and different personalities to come through as they did here. George Washington, as in the biography by Flexner, impressed, but this book also allowed such figures as his officers Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox to be given their due. And as a native New Yorker and life-long resident, I couldn't help but be fascinated by the picture of New York City during the revolutionary period and how so many familiar landmarks figured in the story. Anyone who finds American history interesting should find this greatly enjoyable