TOM PAINE'S WAR: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time, cursory look at a moment in history

TOM PAINE'S WAR: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time
JACK KELLY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1776, one man's words—and the determination of American patriots—allowed our nation to survive its first crisis.

We think of the "Declaration of Independence" as the Revolution's defining document. But two essays appealed even more directly to Americans' feelings in 1776. Thomas Paine—a recent immigrant and self-taught writer—saw that America's rebellion was not simply about taxes and representation. It was a true revolution that could upend the fraud of monarchy and dismantle the aristocratic privilege that had dominated the world for centuries. His pamphlet "Common Sense" convinced Americans that the king had no divine right to rule them—they could rule themselves.

Having inspired patriots to declare their independence, Paine enlisted as a private in the militia. He saw Washington's army suffer defeats. He slogged through the mud with retreating troops to Pennsylvania. There, he wrote "The American Crisis," the most stirring rallying cry in our history. It began: "These are the times that try men's souls . . ." Washington and his men took heart, crossed the Delaware River, and prevailed to fight another day.

A tribute to the Revolution's 250th anniversary, Tom Paine's War is a riveting exploration of the earliest days of our nation's birth. This is a story of the power of words—and the power of belief—and how both speak as well to America's current crisis.

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My Review: I was eager to see how much I could add to my existing store of facts and ideas about the 1776 Revolution, particularly about Paine's role in both crystallizing its justification and fomenting its passions. I got enough interesting analysis regarding the impact, and the centrality, of Paine's expressive writing to find the read involving. Paine himself has left a small footprint in the records we know to exist. There could be others yet undiscovered. Adding new facts to the narrative, then, wasn't on the cards.

This is in no way the author's responsibility, and factors in my rating only very slightly as a tinge of disappointment. I'm not able to offer a higher rating because I found the read felt disorganized, with Paine's words mostly sidelined by accounts of ordinary soldiers' opinions. It's not uninteresting, it's quite involving to see the early days of the Revolution through their eyes. But why say it's "Tom Paine's war" when he's a small part of the larger picture? Is the author attempting to demonstrate that Paine's words ignited revolutionary fervor sufficient to cause the war? In that case, many more examples, or a much deeper dive on the examples included...which frankly feels impossible to me given the paucity of records about ordinary people in eighteenth-century America...would be necessary.

While interesting, this is a shorter, better monograph (honestly, the Author's Note and the Prologue say it all) lurking in a padded read. It would be ideal for a reader new to the topic of the Revolution discussed, or unfamiliar with mass-media's role in igniting war. I think it serves as a decent jumping-off point for other readers, as there are carefully attributed notes throughout as one would expect from this author.

It was not my most successful read, but I can't complain about the prose or the idea animating the book. It's just not quite the book I expected given the title and synopsis.

JACK KELLY'S PAGE: VALCOUR: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty; GOD SAVE BENEDICT AROLD: The True Story of America's Most Hated Man

VALCOUR: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty
JACK KELLY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The wild and suspenseful story of one of the most crucial and least known campaigns of the Revolutionary War

During the summer of 1776, a British incursion from Canada loomed. In response, citizen soldiers of the newly independent nation mounted a heroic defense. Patriots constructed a small fleet of gunboats on Lake Champlain in northern New York and confronted the Royal Navy in a desperate three-day battle near Valcour Island. Their effort surprised the arrogant British and forced the enemy to call off their invasion.

Jack Kelly's Valcour is a story of people. The northern campaign of 1776 was led by the underrated general Philip Schuyler (Hamilton's father-in-law), the ambitious former British officer Horatio Gates, and the notorious Benedict Arnold. An experienced sea captain, Arnold devised a brilliant strategy that confounded his slow-witted opponents.

America’s independence hung in the balance during 1776. Patriots endured one defeat after another. But two events turned the tide: Washington’s bold attack on Trenton and the equally audacious fight at Valcour Island. Together, they stunned the enemy and helped preserve the cause of liberty.

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My Review: I've never really understood how very much the existence of the USA is contingent on the deep stupidity of the British before reading this book. It's shocking just how little we're taught about Arnold's real contribution to the existence of the US. Valcourt, without exaggeration, was central to the success of the war effort as it denied the British possession of an extremely strategic fort.

So why is the name of the battle only a dim clang of a memory-bell in my history-loving brain? Because Arnold won it. And the reputation-destroying politicos in the Continental Congress who feared the success of anyone not named "Washington" would result in disruption of their narrative...and threaten their power...knew it. What they did after Valcourt was inexcusable, but only the first of many such slapdowns issued by politicians to military men. (They were all men; History is not satirized as "his story" for no reason.) Denying Arnold a richly merited promotion was pusillanimous.

This story of Valcourt is heavily slanted towards the naval parts of the story, with mountains of details I never knew I didn't know about ships, their functioning, their strengths and weaknesses in battle, their command structures...it's a lot to take in. I wasn't always sure I cared, while being unwilling to skip over the data because the author's sneaky and uses these facts to good effect in battle anecdotes. An old didactic trick that never fails to trip up the facile reader/student. (In college I had an entire letter knocked off my essay grade because I knew the material, but skipped class the day it was applied to a specific place so did not relate it to that place despite that being clearly stated as part of the requirement.)

Author Kelly is clearly setting a course into microhistory, prioritizing deep-but-narrow slices of the giant, continent-spanning contests facing the British and the French in the wake of their first-ever world war (The Seven Years' War, 1756 to 1763). If Valcour had not stopped the British from failing at Saratoga, it is doubtful Louis XVI would have funded the war for the American revolutionaries. It is easy, then, to see why someone with an historian's eye for the results of a conflict and a novelist's sense of story would light on this underknown event with glee.

It is both strength and weakness in this story. If one is not au fait with the Revolution and its roots already, this is not the place to start that journey. Too much will slow the reader's pace that the author's at pains to set...looking people up, finding out who did what to whom before the events described. As it never pretended to be an introductory text to the conflict I'm only mentioning it as a fact for y'all to be aware of in deciding about the read's suitability for your taste. I felt I knew enough to be fully engaged in the material completely new to me without worrying about the background. It is, in fact, a favorite genre of mine. Microhistories suit my own readerly desire to dig into *why* if I already know *what* happened.

I found the author's use of notes added to my interest but didn't point me in new directions for reading further about the subject. It's the reason I stopped at a fourth star. A five-star history read needs to blow me right away and/or point me in new or unexpected directions. None of that happened here. The notes demonstrated the author's superior command of archives, and his selections from those archives definitely were apt and germane.

On balance I'll recommend the read to those already interested in the Revolutionary War, and familiar with its broad strokes, who seek more colorful aspects of its story.

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GOD SAVE BENEDICT AROLD: The True Story of America's Most Hated Man
JACK KELLY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Benedict Arnold committed treason—for more than two centuries, that’s all that most Americans have known about him.

Yet Arnold was much more than a turncoat—his achievements during the early years of the Revolutionary War defined him as the most successful soldier of the era. God Save Benedict Arnold tells the gripping story of Arnold’s rush of audacious feats—his capture of Fort Ticonderoga, his Maine mountain expedition to attack Quebec, the famous artillery brawl at Valcour Island, the turning-point battle at Saratoga—that laid the groundwork for our independence.

Arnold was a superb leader, a brilliant tactician, a supremely courageous military officer. He was also imperfect, disloyal, villainous. One of the most paradoxical characters in American history, and one of the most interesting. God Save Benedict Arnold does not exonerate him for his treason—the stain on his character is permanent. But Kelly’s insightful exploration of Arnold’s career as a warrior shines a new light on this gutsy, fearless, and enigmatic figure. In the process, the book offers a fresh perspective on the reasons for Arnold’s momentous change of heart.

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My Review: I love this description of Benedict Arnold:

In many ways, he was a typical American—cocky, restless, grasping, perpetually optimistic, quick to take offense. He was a vivid example of the self-reliance and rugged individualism that would be celebrated by Americans from Ralph Wales Emerson to Ronald Reagan. But self-reliance can beget arrogance.

The man behind the victory detailed in the book reviewed above, and the consequential actions he committed later, comes fully alive in Author Kelly's telling of his subject's character. It's not a biography, in the sense that the focus is not on Arnold the man and his life, but a political biography of the deeds he did and the responses of others that impacted him for good and ill.

I was not at all familiar with the details of the very real grievances Arnold harbored against the men who, I agree, wronged and slighted him. I'm caught up with it now. As a person, the picture of Arnold that I got from the extensive quotations from period sources is of an eighteenth-century Elon Musk, someone who can make enemies much more readily than friends while delivering results. I suspect he was as thin-skinned as he comes across in these pages because he really was a better strategist than tactician.

Ultimately his rage-quit of the Revolutionary War was completely understandable, predictable and preventable. The mediocre men who resented him for his strengths handed him the rope he used to hang himself. His own angry demons led him to use it; what he gained was material, what he lost was the lasting capital of reputation.

As I've come to expect of Author Kelly, he uses period sources galore. I'm impressed with his notes because he is scrupulous in citing the sources of opinions not leaving us to wonder if this is his opinion or something considered to be fact in the period. When it's his opinion, I see it presented as such; when it's his analysis of period opinion the same applies.

I don't suddenly like this traitor to the cause of American independence. I do empathize with him, understand "why" better, and still disapprove of his actions. A man of such tremendous capability and capacity for foresight, undone by the niggling ugliness of his character flaws.

Where have we seen that story repeated here lately....

Not a five-star, blow-me-away read, but a much better than average, really interesting story about an unjustly reviled but still critically flawed man.

THEM: The best time to pay attention was twenty-five years ago; second-best is now

THEM: Adventures with Extremists
JON RONSON
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the bestselling author of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

Them began as a book about different kinds of extremists, but after Jon had got to know some of them—Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen—he found that they had one oddly similar belief: that a tiny, shadowy elite rule the world from a secret room.

In Them, Jon sets out, with the help of the extremists, to locate that room. The journey is as creepy as it is comic and, along the way, Jon is chased by men in dark glasses, unmasked as a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp, and witnesses international CEOs and politicians participate in a bizarre pagan ritual in the forests of northern California.

Them is a fascinating and entertaining exploration of extremism, in which Jon learns some alarming things about the looking-glass world of "them" and "us". Are the extremists on to something? Or has Jon become one of THEM?

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My Review: Twenty-plus years on, this book isn't obsolete.

I've never typed a sadder, more fraught sentence in the entirety of my life. Details are outdated, but that in no way invalidates Author Ronson's analysis (though it chops a half-star off...time for a new edition!)

Alex Jones was utterly exposed as the lunatic bigot he really is in this book long before Sandy Hook blew that closet door off its hinges, and yet this complete careful takedown had no effect on his ability to convince people to invest in his idiocy.

In his experience, detailed in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (q.v.), people have taken old-fashioned social organization with them into the digital age. The conspiracy theorists of today have a long lineage of hatred for the Jews, a long-standing mistrust of Authority (except of course for themselves; after all, they know The Truth℠, everyone else is a sad little dupe of Them), and no longer have to have a public owning of their nutjobbery.

Emotional dysregulation is far easier to run out of control in parasocial interactions with authority, or authoritative, figures. These are ever-more common events in our social lives as more and more time is spent in internet-mediated contact...post-pandemic there is a huge increase in time spent in and effect of parasocial relationships, which is only exacerbating the ongoing radicalization of younger men in Western society.

Author Ronson, trained as a journalist, is very much a careful observer of the people he speaks to; he does not come right out and say "that was a lie" but he very carefully notes what tells an observant listener and/or reader what marks something out as, in fact, a lie. Staying alert to subtext is, after all, a big part of a journalist's brief...another reason why "They" want fewer trained journalists in the world. It's part of a truly unnerving perversion of the truism that all of us together are smarter than any one of us alone...phrased best by Mark Twain: "When you set aside mere names & come down to realities, you find that we are ruled by a King just as other absolute monarchies are. His name is The Majority. He is mighty in bulk & strength ... He rules by the right of possessing less money & less brains & more ignorance than the other competitor for the throne, The Minority. Ours is an Absolute Monarchy." (Mark Twain at Large, Arthur L. Scott, p. 96-97.)

The jaws of the trap "They" have spent fifty years building, slowly and carefully, are springing shut. I do not know if there is still time to wedge a stick of sturdy truthtelling in them.

I'm sure gonna give it a whirl.

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THEM: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal
BEN SASSE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing American Adult, an intimate and urgent assessment of the existential crisis facing our nation.

Something is wrong. We all know it.

American life expectancy is declining for a third straight year. Birth rates are dropping. Nearly half of us think the other political party isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. We’re the richest country in history, but we’ve never been more pessimistic. What’s causing the despair?

In Them, bestselling author and U.S. Senator Ben Sasse argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn’t really about politics. It’s that we’re so lonely we can’t see straight—and it bubbles out as anger.

Local communities are collapsing. Across the nation, little leagues are disappearing, Rotary clubs are dwindling, and in all likelihood, we don’t know the neighbor two doors down. Work isn’t what we’d hoped: less certainty, few lifelong coworkers, shallow purpose. Stable families and enduring friendships—life’s fundamental pillars—are in statistical freefall.

As traditional tribes of place evaporate, we rally against common enemies so we can feel part of on a team. No institutions command widespread public trust, enabling foreign intelligence agencies to use technology to pick the scabs on our toxic divisions. We’re in danger of half of us believing different facts than the other half, and the digital revolution throws gas on the fire.

There’s a path forward—but reversing our decline requires something radical: a rediscovery of real places and real human-to-human relationships. Even as technology nudges us to become rootless, Sasse shows how only a recovery of rootedness can heal our lonely souls.

America wants you to be happy, but more urgently, America needs you to love your neighbor. Fixing what’s wrong with the country depends on you rebuilding right where you’re planted.

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My Review: I'm allergic to old-fashioned neighborliness, community-building exercises, the idea that living in the same zip code says something fundamental about my connection to people.

In days of yore, that would've marked me out as weird. Now that makes me...for the first time in my adult life...mainstream. And what did Mark Twain say about about agreeing with the majority? "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)."

I doubt I can change much, but others? There's hope for them and by extension all of us.

That Author Sasse is a Republican should tell anyone who knows me everything I need to convey by reporting positive agreement with his prescription for what ails the US body politic. (Also, per Wikipedia, Senator Sasse: "{o}n February 13, 2021, ...was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial."} Go former Senator Sasse!)

The anomie and isolation of seemingly the majority of young people is absolutely terrifying. What Author Sasse posits as solutions earn all my four stars. His framing of the problems we face is resolutely inside the educated elite PoV one would expect from a lifelong academic and former Senator. Only in the funhouse mirror of US politics is this man in any way a centrist. He is also not wrong.

Many of the rights and norms Author Sasse identified as under threat in this 2018 book, eg the inalienable rights of all individuals including habeas corpus, and the freedom of conscience and the right to exercise it in private life (the Dobbs decision rises before my appalled eyes),have been explicitly targeted by the current administration. It's been a long, slow process to dumb down and distract people away from the assault on our institutions of trust and collective action. Look at Project 2025's digital ghosts.

A big part of that process has been the demonization and politicization of Others. When someone is Other, they're not protected like you should be, or protected from you like they should be. A long and successful campaign to convince people "They" are a threat to decency and rightness has been waged by the real "Them" the actual political operators of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and so on.

Destroying the people's willingness to see each other as real, decent people who might disagree on things but who nonetheless have a lot in common, or divide and conquer, has been the colonizer's, the fascist's, the authoritarian's cornerstone strategy for millennia. It hasn't stopped working yet.

You, as an individual, have to stop falling for it in order to defeat it.

Read some of Sasse's ideas and try them out.

THE WHISKEY REBELS, excellent historical thriller about how far back anti-gummint fervor goes in the US

THE WHISKEY REBELS
DAVID LISS
Random House
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: David Liss’s bestselling historical thrillers, including A Conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader, have been called remarkable and rousing: the perfect combination of scrupulous research and breathless excitement. Now Liss delivers his best novel yet in an entirely new setting–America in the years after the Revolution, an unstable nation where desperate schemers vie for wealth, power, and a chance to shape a country’s destiny.

Ethan Saunders, once among General Washington’s most valued spies, now lives in disgrace, haunting the taverns of Philadelphia. An accusation of treason has long since cost him his reputation and his beloved fiancée, Cynthia Pearson, but at his most desperate moment he is recruited for an unlikely task–finding Cynthia’s missing husband. To help her, Saunders must serve his old enemy, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who is engaged in a bitter power struggle with political rival Thomas Jefferson over the fragile young nation’s first real financial institution: the Bank of the United States.

Meanwhile, Joan Maycott is a young woman married to another Revolutionary War veteran. With the new states unable to support their ex-soldiers, the Maycotts make a desperate gamble: trade the chance of future payment for the hope of a better life on the western Pennsylvania frontier. There, amid hardship and deprivation, they find unlikely friendship and a chance for prosperity with a new method of distilling whiskey. But on an isolated frontier, whiskey is more than a drink; it is currency and power, and the Maycotts’ success attracts the brutal attention of men in Hamilton’s orbit, men who threaten to destroy all Joan holds dear.

As their causes intertwine, Joan and Saunders–both patriots in their own way–find themselves on opposing sides of a daring scheme that will forever change their lives and their new country. The Whiskey Rebels is a superb rendering of a perilous age and a nation nearly torn apart–and David Liss’s most powerful novel yet.

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My Review: Liss in true Liss form! I adored A Conspiracy of Paper and A Spectacle of Corruption and enjoyed greatly The Coffee Trader. Mr. Liss is a writer with several gifts, and seemingly displays them to their best advantage in works of historical fiction. (I was no fan of The Ethical Assassin since it felt undeveloped and unfinished to me. And don't get me started on The Devil's Company and its icky anti-bisexual silliness that added nothing to the plot.)

Most unusually, Mr. Liss can take any business conflict and make it into a story. He tells us the story of the business panic that in part led to the Whiskey Rebellion in this novel (I grossly oversimplify the twists and turns, but that’s the penalty of wanting to keep this under 5000 words!) from the points of view held by two victims of honor. Ethan Saunders and Joan Maycott have wildly diverging aims in this novel; their conflict is completely believable; they are characters representing very real conflicts in American society at that time, and they do so without feeling like invented mouthpieces for a particular cause or view. This is Mr. Liss’s extraordinary gift to historical fiction, that his characters breathe enough life to seem as though their actions are inevitable outgrowths of their described and/or demonstrated interests. This talent above all others should win Mr. Liss a place on the bestseller lists, since he competes against authors of creative facility and character-building imbecility (eg, James Patterson, John Grisham) for male readership.

Another of the gifts Mr. Liss brings to the table is his deftness of plotting. It takes a writer of skill to make a complex issue like a bank failure (and how timely is that choice of plot point!) into something exciting to the reader and highly personal to the characters. I was riveted to the descriptions of one character’s machinations to achieve a particular result to the failure of the Million Bank and the reasons for that character’s venomous hatreds and callously indifferent behaviors was both cause and effect in the spiraling, stomach-churning race that forms the last thrilling 40 pages of this novel.

Really highly recommended for anyone looking to find a fine writer with a gift for storytelling coupled to a sense of timing that cannot be beat.