Book Review

I'll be reviewing the last month's worth of comic books soon, but in the meantime, here's a nice book review from a book I recently checked out from the library.

1776 by David McCullough.

Amazing what they don't teach American kids in school. A lot of this was news to me, stuff I'd never heard about or read about before. The horrible defeats, the ugly behavior of the troops, the sheer stupid mistakes. Most of it was nothing I'd ever heard about.

As a for instance, I've heard MANY times about Washington crossing the Delaware. Until reading this book, the event was never in context, so I had no idea just what it meant. Put into the focus of the first full year of war, it became something more than a painting.

If history was taught more like this and less like "so and so did this and that in such and such year" more people would love it.

I have a couple of complaints about the book. The first is that I finished it wanting more. I wanted the whole revolution spelled out like this. I wanted it to go to the end, not just cover the one year it promised to cover.

My second complaint was the lack of maps that made sense. Oh, there are a few maps. Mostly utterly unreadable. I would have liked a really basic map of New York in 1776 so I could follow the action. As it was, I haven't got a sense of the layout of the city at all (past or present), so when the movement of troops is described, I just got utterly lost.

Still, it was a good read despite the problem, and worth looking into if you want a fairly good look at one of the defining moments of American history.