In the vein of "possibly more than you could possibly want to know about a particular person" and yet also learn very close to nothing at all about a subject, this would be the book for you.
The biggest surprise for anyone who picks up this book is that surprisingly little of it describes the interactions between Washington and Arnold, despite the subtitle. Apparently they weren’t that frequent and the two men have very little contact during the first half of the book. Unfortunately for me and anyone who is less than interested meticulously researched historical pageants describing battle after battle in the Revolutionary War, maps and all, there is an abundance of this and not much in the way of summation or analysis.
The author is sympathetic to Arnold's plight, cognizant of his short comings and does a good job drawing an understandable and believable picture of what went right and what went very wrong for him as the war progressed. As to the fate of the American Revolution, there are a number of statements in the prologue that are not backed up within the book, at least to my ear, and overall I was disappointed. I did just read Richard Atkinson's 'The Fate of the Day", which is a far better chronicle of much of this time, so hindered by that.
Do not be daunted by the length of the book--close to half the total pages come after the epilogue. I was reading an e-book, and had to reassure myself it would not last the full 500+ pages.
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