The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb

I have read a number of these sorts of books, where the reader is urged to think of things in a different way and I continue to read them, one because they show up on lists of books that are worthy of reading, and two because while I am largely in the land of the already converted, I learn a thing or two and it makes it overall worthwhile to have read, although it is slow going because my pervasive thought is yes, I agree. This is one such book. The author has spent years researching the rich social, emotional, and cognitive lives of our closest living relatives. She exposes the ways that many scientific studies are biased against other species and reveals underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life—from the language of songbirds and prairie dogs, to the cultures of chimpanzees and reef fishes, to the acumen of plants and fungi. With compelling stories and fresh research she gives us a paradigm-shifting way of looking at other organisms on their own terms, one that is revolutionizing our perception both of them and of ourselves. Is this new? No it is not. Darwin considered humans one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet one might that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that ever lived. This flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth towards our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance. The opposite approach, the author posits, is a better, sustainable way of life with the potential to heal and rejuvenate our shared planet.

The Spinach King by John Seabrook

This is a memoir that chronicles three generations of the author’s family and their South Jersey-based agricultural empire, Seabrook Farms. At the heart of the narrative is the author's great-grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, an autocratic, driven patriarch who revolutionized the frozen-food industry. Often hailed as the "Henry Ford of agriculture," C.F. built the company into the biggest vegetable factory on earth. This is a story of improbable success followed by implosion through his paranoia, greed, and abusive treatment of family members. The emotional core of the book lies in the author's complex relationship with his father, Jack—a stylish, patrician figure and playboy who desperately sought his father's approval. Jack had a lavish life style and hobnobbed with movie stars but further squandered the financial resources of the business. Beyond the family drama, the book does not shy away from the darker history of Seabrook Farms. Seabrook made a fortune during World War II by employing interned Japanese Americans and, later, displaced persons from Europe to staff his massive fields. The book uncovers the company’s controversial labor practices, including a violent 1934 labor strike involving armed vigilantes and the Ku Klux Klan. These events paint a complex picture of ingenuity coexisting with labor exploitation.

Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard Book by Joan E. Strassmann

I very much enjoyed this book and it comes as a reminder about how important it is to keep in mind the things that are literally right outside your door. And the slow in the title is not a reflection on the intelligence of the birder, but rather that you are slowing down and taking your time rather than marching from house to car and back again, but rather taking your time to see what is on offer in your own neighborhood. It is a push back against the relentless drive to incessantly add to birding life lists; the book advocates for deep study in one area rather than spotting a bird and moving on to the next one. The commoner can be just as fascinating as the exotic. The book covers 16 birds, from Blue Jays to Snow Geese, that can be seen in her part of St. Louis. What makes her book particularly compelling is the research she shares on each of these so-called common birds--they are so much more varied and interesting than at first glance. The book also breaks down the sections based on location, covering her home as well as sites which are within a 20-mile radius of home. She gives examples of the differences that motivate different birds when they are competing for resources and what the outcomes might be between everything from interspecies competition to competition between siblings in the nest and what factors might dictate the outcome. This is maybe not a book for an experienced birder, or a competitive life list birder, but rather for someone who wants to experience more of the world right around them.

Birds and Us by Tim Birkhead

This is an expansive look at man's interactions with birds, written by an academic ornithologist. It opens with a visit to Cueva del Tajo de las Figuras, located in Andalusia, Spain and the Neolithic bird paintings on its walls. This is an 8,000-year old depiction of flamingos, herons, raptors, avocets and many other species. Birkhead recounts the story of how the cave was discovered in the early 20th-century and then Abbé Henri Breuilsummarizes academics’ efforts to identify the 208 birds on the cave wall--I really enjoy these ancient cave paintings, and it was a good place to start from my perspective. Each chapters focuses on a chronological era and sometimes a place, through the details within often jump around in time and space. There’s the Neolithic era; Ancient Egypt; Ancient Greece and Rome (Aristotle liked birds, as did Pliny and Plutarch); Medieval times (mostly falconry); the Renaissance; the groundbreaking classification work of Francis Willughby and John Ray in the late Renaissance; the seabirds of the Faroe Islands (an essay on the interaction between puffins, murres, fulmars and the people who kill and eat them, a delicate balance first observed by a Danish priest in the mid-17th-century); the 19th-century ideological explosion that followed the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species ; the Victorian Era’s obsession with the collecting of bird skins and eggs ; the development of field-based ornithological research in Europe and Great Britain; a quick step back through the history to look at bird protection, conservation, and our precarious future, with a focus on Birkhead’s long-term Common Guillemot research at Skomer Island, Wales (which he has written about a number of times before). It is scattershot but interesting, and he is a reasonable storyteller, so it is a good way to learn more about birds if you are so inclined.

All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh

I picked this book out because the New York Times put it on their Notable Books of 2025 list, and I try to read somewhere between a 1/3 and a 1/2 of their picks over the course of the following year (if I didn't manage to read them before the list came out, that is), and this was both on the list, and an intriguing idea. The author was a contestant in the Great British Bake Off and is a food writer. In this book she examines the forces shaping our appetites. What unseen cultural baggage do we bring to the table when we choose what to eat? In the 17th century eating was understood to have a transformative power on one’s character, with the constituents of food able to define and alter an individual’s constitution, an association that persisted even as its scientific underpinning faded away. Eating beef, for instance, was believed to make one strong and honest, but also violent and stupid, and was particularly associated with Englishmen. A series of 17th- and 18th-century satires contrasted the solid vigor of English beefeaters with the frog-and-soup-eating French. Food, the satires suggest, has always been about more than just taste, touching on issues of nationhood, ideology, and collective identity, and we have yet to escape that in modern times. Now we are influenced by Tik Tok and Instagram. The author contends that your great-grandmother would likely not recognize your lunch, but she certainly wouldn’t recognize the Instagram Reels recipe you followed to make it, or the multinational megacorp delivery service you ordered the ingredients from, or perhaps even the ingredients themselves, imported out of season from across the globe and repackaged by savvy marketers. She is putting a fine point on what has changed in the last 20 years, and while I still rely on cookbooks form my recipes, the breadth of those has also exploded, and the food we eat has changed in many ways worth thinking about.

John and Paul by Ian Leslie

This is an iconic duo in an epically iconic band. The Beatles created music you have had in your head since childhood reveal new and unsuspected shades of meaning 50 years later. Beatles songs aren’t like most pop songs; instead of fading, they take on a richer color and nuance with time, not least because new generations of fans inquire more deeply into what previous listeners might have overlooked or simply misunderstood. One twist of the kaleidoscope and a song we thought we knew suddenly sounds even better than it did the first 100 times we heard it. The author argues that there was “no John without Paul, and vice versa”. This is about the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the unprecedented peaks the two of them scaled in remaking English popular music. This is about going deeper than the myth about the pair--he tries to figure out what their chemistry was and why it fell apart. After the Beatles finally disbanded, the author challenges the consensus that formed that Paul was the straight man to John’s rebel bohemian – vanilla against brimstone – which hardened into holy writ on Lennon’s murder in 1980. Their collaboration was as tight and co-dependent as two climbers roped together on a mountain face. They each went on to do more but there was never the same magic, and this is an interesting take on what that was all about.

Children Of The Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick

A little over a year ago China quietly ended its three decades of international adoptions. This cessation came almost a decade after China—again quietly—put an end to its one-child policy, which also lasted more than three decades. While reporting from China for the LA Times, the author uncovered some difficult truths about international adoptions in a country that was supposed to be the among the most ethical in the world. She weaves the histories of both China’s one-child policy and Chinese international adoptions into the story of a pair of separated twins, making for a thrilling narrative that is hard to put down. Identical twins Fangfang and Shuangjie were born in a mountainous village in Hunan province, the third and fourth children in their family. Fangfang, the older of the twins, was a healthy baby, but Shuangjie was a little sickly and needed more care. Fearful of the local family planning office, the twins’ parents worried that they would be caught and punished for having more than one child. They already had a second daughter after their first was born, but they worried they would have a difficult time evading attention with twins. So, they sent Fangfang to live with her aunt and uncle. The author writes about two scandals that plagued Chinese adoptions. The first involved individuals trafficking babies and toddlers, taking them from their homes and bringing them to orphanages. The second involved government family planning offices doing the same. Both the individual traffickers and the family planning offices made massive amounts of money “facilitating” these adoptions to foreign parents. It is hard to know how common this was, and with DNA testing a lot more is being uncovered, but this is a fascinating read.

The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life by Rob Dunn

I enjoyed this book, and there are a lot of engaging stories told in it, but it is not ground breaking when read by someone with a life long interest and participation in science. It opens with a couple of interesting stories about inter species cooperation. The first is the one that the title of the book is derived from. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, birds known as honeyguides once used a specific call to lead humans to beehives so they could split the spoils of wax and honey. The other takes place in southeastern Australia, wild orcas partnered with Thaua people to hunt baleen whales. The Inca empire banned the killing of cormorants and pelicans whose droppings fertilized their crops. These relationships are known as “mutualisms,” and the author suggests such dynamics were once common and could be again in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of how different species interact in cooperative ways. This is particularly important to think about at a time when so many people are trying to break things rather than fix them. The United States in particular has become a pugilistic bully with a fascist leader bent on getting his way and trampling everything and everybody in his way--instead, diplomacy and cooperation have gotten us so much further and benefitted the greatest number of people. May we go the way of the Honeyguide.

We The People by Jill Lepore

This is it, the exhaustive look back at the US Constitution--well, not so exhaustive that it starts with the Magna Carta, and at no point does the author go back to what had happened in England that led up to England's colony rising up and breaking away--she really starts at the post war Constitutional Convention, and how we ended up with the mish mash that we got. The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world—and one of the most difficult to amend. At what cost? In this landmark, lavishly illustrated book, Harvard professor of history and law Jill Lepore argues that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. Challenging both originalism and the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation, Lepore argues that the framers never intended for the Constitution to be kept, like a butterfly, under glass, but instead expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, improving the machinery of government. The argument against "originalism" is the best part of the book, where she refers to to the writers of the constituion said about it at the time--and that the Federalist Papers were published in a newspaper well after the constitution, and were not even generally available until the last 20th century. These originalists just basically made that all up and nobody fact checked them. At the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding and in an account as radical as Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the United States, Lepore offers a sweeping, lyrical, and democratic constitutional history, telling the stories of generations of Americans who have attempted everything from abolishing the Electoral College to guaranteeing environmental rights, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution.

The Fate Of The Day by Rick Atkinson

I read a review of this book that the writer had been reading this author's military histories for years and years--and maybe that was because they took years and years to come out. I had to laugh because this is meant to be the middle book of a trilopy but took over 5 years to be published after the first, and hope he manages to get through the third! Always seems like you should be pretty close to having it in the bag if tou announce how mant there will ultimately be. In any case, this volume covers 1777 to 1780 and goes through the uncertain future of the Revolution as the American Colonials faced defeat after defeat, super-cold winters (including one that could be said to have almost ended the rebellion at Valley Forge in 1777-78), and an ineffective Congress. In these middle years of the war, only a fateful victory at Saratoga, and the ill-fated occupation (and then withdrawal from) Philadelphia by the British, lifted American hopes that the British could actually be defeated. Otherwise, money shortages, shortages of ammunition and supplies, and deserting troops made American defeat very possible. The reader gets the sense of how back and forth the momentum was, how many mercenary soldiers were employed, and how tenuous the rebel position was. There are no whitewashes, and George Washington is presented as a troubled and flawed figure who wasn’t always the best general but who was doing as much as he could to bring the army together when he didn’t get much support from Congress. Other figures, both American and British, are given fresh looks. Nobody is a complete angel or devil. Instead, these figures are three-dimensional people with their own sides being presented as well as how others viewed them. Atkinson also doesn’t shy away from the darker areas of American history. Slavery and how slaves took part on both the American and British side, are well-represented in a clear fashion. Native Americans mostly fight with the British and the reasons why are fleshed out--and may have fueled future conflicts. Overall, this is very much a military description of this time period, with interesting back stories fleshed out but are not at the center of the story. Brace yourself, there is a lot of carnage.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

I have enjoyed a couple of other of historian David McCullough's books, and think he is a good story teller. This biography, which is not just about Wilbur and Orville, but also about the family that nurtured them and the time in which they lived, is fascinating when considering the components in the story that led to their ultimate success. It starts with their parents. Susan Wright was the daughter of a carriage maker. Growing up in her father’s workshop she had learned to design and build things. It was she who taught the boys to notice how things worked, how to draw out plans for things before building them, and how to use tools. She taught them about wind resistance when they were designing and building a sled together. Their father encouraged them to explore as well. Another thing that makes this book interesting is the way it illustrates how one project or invention led to another. First it was building a sled. Then they built a rudder to steer it. When the snow melted they built a wagon using wheels from discarded tricycles. Next they built and flew kites. Next, a chair for their mother. When it became Will’s job to fold copies of the newspaper their father edited and their church published, they invented a machine to fold the newspapers. Next was a toy helicopter, then a printing press. Since a printing press is useless without something to print they began a newspaper, The West Side Tatler. They sold advertising and saved all their profits. Then they needed bicycles to deliver the papers, so they built them out of discarded bicycle parts. They became more interested in building bicycles than writing and selling newspapers so they opened a bicycle shop. You can see where this is going. It’s a good lesson for us mothers on how children’s interests, when nurtured in the right kind of environment and with the guidance and encouragement of an understanding parent, can lead those children into successful careers. I love the way this book shows that this invention of an airplane, which changed the world and the future of everyone in it, was something that grew out of the skills and interests and habits learned within the context of their family. The author does not explore the question of whether of not the brothers were neurotypical, but I suspect at least Wilbur was not--and the importance of that for fostering innovation now and in the future.

Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick

Ok, first off, if you are looking for a book about Elvis the man, you are not going to be happy with this. While it is densely researched, it ends in the late 1950's--it really is about how it all got started . It is based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, it traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world. This volume tracks the first twenty-four years of Elvis’ life, covering his childhood, the stunning first recordings at Sun Records (“That’s All Right,” “Mystery Train”), and the early RCA hits (“Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel”). There’s more to this book than Elvis. It’s also the story of the American music industry in the 1950s. There is alot about how music was made and marketed at that time, and how rock n roll changed it. It wasn’t just about the sound but about how the music was actually sold. For example, how going on near-constant tour to small music venues was considered the best way to market yourself. The chapters about how Elvis’s manager, the Colonel, got him onto television and how television really started to change the music industry were fascinating. I heard and read a lot of the very bad things about the Colonel. This book really brought to light the why. The Colonel may have taken a much larger percent (25%) than was usual (10%), but he also had a great business mind and really got things done. It was the Colonel who got Elvis on television and in the movies. I’d always thought the Colonel pushed Elvis into the movies but this book showed from its extensive interviews that Elvis himself was quite interested in being like James Dean. The relationship, at least at the beginning, was a lot more give and take, and then inevitably it deteriorated, as did they.

Valiant Ambition by Nathaniel Philbrick

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.

Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney

I, like the author, love Jane Austen. Unlike her, I know nothing about the world of rare books, and while I know only slightly more now than before I read this book, I have a better understanding of what draws people not just ot the book itself, but to those who read this exact volume before one picks it up. She asks the question about who might have influenced Austen and the answer is that there were quite a few women authors who wrote in the late 18th and early 19th century and who clearly Austen read because she mentions them by name in her letters to her siblings and in some cases because she has lifted things out of their books to make her own. It is a wonder someone hasn’t thought before to do a little detective work into the authors that influenced her: Ann Radcliffe, whose 1794 gothic thriller The Mysteries of Udolpho peppers every other conversation in Northanger Abbey; Elizabeth Inchbald, whose 1798 play Lovers’ Vows is rehearsed by the characters in Mansfield Park; and Frances Burney, whose third novel, Camilla (1796), originated the phrase “pride and prejudice”. The interesting thing is not that they exist but more that they have been largely forgotten. I was able to find their hallmark works through the Guttenberg project and in the Kindle library, and will uspdate later as I read through some of them, but this author thinks that they are worthy. In addition to the above, she found Fanny Burney’s Evelina to be bold and witty, Charlotte Lennox, whose The Female Quixote" is witty and smart, to Elizabeth Inchbald, whose concise and ironic style may have influenced Austen as well. It is great fun to read this.

Radium Girls by Kate Moore

This is a book of pain--chronicling the horrors of what happened to young women who worked with radium and very painful to read the account of it. Almost every page contains an example of suffering: a disintegrating lower jaw that falls from its owner’s mouth onto the breakfast table; a sarcoma the size of a grapefruit growing on a chin; skin rendered so thin that it splits open at the touch of a fingernail. Those afflicted were almost exclusively young women who had, in the two decades after 1917, been employed by two separate companies (in New Jersey and Illinois) painting watches, clocks and military instruments with a luminous mixture containing a tiny amount of radium. They were paid well for what was regarded as glamorous and exciting work; some would find themselves earning more even than their fathers. What they did not know then was that they were also ingesting a substance that, once it had infiltrated their bones, would work slowly but surely to destroy them from the inside. The second half of the book is about the physicians who finally figured out that while a small amount of targeted radiation could cure a patient, the amount the women ingested was poisoning them and once that was discovered, the lengths that the company went to to avoid compensating them, as well as not preventing it from happening to others. Their eventual success in court led to reforms in the work place that made it possible to work more safely on the Manhattan Project, and with radioactive material in the future. It is a harrowing tale and a difficult read.

Why Taiwan Matters by Kerry Brown

I am thinking of going to Taiwan and there is a dearth of information about the island nation as a tourist destination. Ergo I resorted to learning more about it's history and the complex triangular relationship between Taiwan, China, and the United States. The author asserts that the road to Taiwan’s peace and security runs through Beijing. The better the world understands this, the better informed we are to make decisions regarding this highly sensitive affair. This isn’t to say that Taiwan has no input in the matter – in fact, Taiwan is increasingly becoming detached from China as the generations pass on. Even though the native population of the island is dwarfed by the Han Chinese descendants, which is true on the mainland as well, they are not aligned with China culturally. A distinct Taiwanese identity, which has always existed in different forms, has emerged with greater vigor, especially after the pro-democracy reforms which started in the late 1980s and flourished in the mid-nineties with the election of Lee Teng-hui, frequently referred to as Taiwan’s “father of democracy.” This is an entry point to getting to know Taiwan.

Born In Flames by Bench Ansfield

I was really surprised by the story that this book tells--which is really about my naivete and lack of education rather than that it is surprising. This is the first book by a historian who debuts with a riveting and meticulous chronicle of the wave of arsons-for-profit that burned through America’s cities in the 1970s. The book focuses on the Bronx, which notoriously lost around 20% of its housing stock, though they argue that the borough is more of an example of a lesser-known arson epidemic that devastated neighborhoods of color across the country. Dispelling the racist myth that residents set the fires themselves, the author traces the confluence of financial factors that motivated absentee landlords to burn their neglected, deteriorating properties. These factors included high-cost, low-coverage state-sponsored insurance policies that debuted following the racial uprisings of the 1960s (when insurance companies abandoned riot-affected areas); insurance companies’ newfound practice of investing customer premiums for profit, which further inflated premiums to astronomical heights; and city budget cuts that decimated the FDNY. They chronicle not just the landlords who profited but also the tenants who, as they tracked the conflagrations’ block-by-block progress, fearfully went to bed with their shoes on; some were even burned out of more than one apartment. The book also unearths the tenant-organized activism, in collaboration with local officials and even some of the insurance companies themselves, that finally ended the fires. The result is an outstanding exposé of the predatory capitalist machinations behind the “Bronx is burning” saga. This is not so much a page turner as a book that raises the level of awareness of exactly how bad slum lords treated their tenants and how they maximized profits.

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I read this as a fulfillment of one of the 2026 Goodreads reading challenges--it fulfilled a category that was hard for me because I had read about 80% of the books that qualified already. Otherwise I would likely not have found this. It is about looking inwards, building with what you have and being grateful and appreciative for what you have. When you look at a berry, the serviceberry is featured here, but any wild berry will do--what do you see? In her latest book, the US botanist and author views a tiny fruit through all of these that it does--it feeds the wild life around it, who in turn help it to spread when you expel the seeds, all the interconnected ways a berry becomes an integral part of our world. Then she goes on to illuminate the much bigger questions about how we humans relate to plants, to the natural world and to each other. The author is a university professor, a botanist, and a citizen of the Potawatomi nation, and she is becoming one of the best known environmental writers working today.

The Containment by Michelle Adams

This is subtitled: Detroit, The Supreme Court, and The Battle For Racial Justice In The North. I was interested in this topic--when I was in 6th grade in the early 1970's my school district in Pasadena, California desegregated, and not without challenges. There was a lot of negative energy around it, but my parents sat me down and asked me what I wanted to do, and we agreed to give it a try. For three years I was bussed to a school that was majority black and brown students and I had a life changing science teacher who lit a fire under me about just how cool the subject was and changed the course os my life. This book takes place years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954 and looks at the effort to change Detroit, the first northern locale to be brought to court. The U.S. Supreme Court remained committed to integration in the face of widespread protests, administrative game playing and other forms of resistance deployed throughout the South. Fed up with the region’s intransigence, it unanimously declared, in 1968, that such delays are no longer tolerable. The court went a step further in 1971. Granting federal judges broad discretion to desegregate schools — including busing, if necessary — the justices unanimously affirmed that their support for desegregating schools. The book’s section on institutional racism is most illuminating and paints a telling picture of why, without judicial intervention, integration was out of reach in many metropolitan areas. In contrast to the easily identifiable Jim Crow mandates prevalent in the South, bigotry in the North occurred largely out of sight, where public and private actors fueled the discriminatory housing practices that underpinned educational segregation. Real estate agents concealed listings in White neighborhoods from Black home buyers. Many houses included racial covenants, and federal housing agencies redlined Black neighborhoods. This dynamic hid in the gray areas of law and politics. And most tellingly, all of this seems very relevant and not that different 50 years on.

The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson

This book is the first of a trilogy to go step by step through the Revolutionary War, this volume covering 1775-1777. What it does not do is the preambe, what exactly happened over time that led to open defiance of the British, mostly in New England, but also in the Southern states when slavery was threatened. The South couldn't survive without it. What it does do is walk through the decisions made once there was war and what their consequences were. This is not the good part if you are an American, and it doesn't reflect well for the British either. It is a book full of mistakes that were made. The first two years of the Revolutionary War harrowing. New England’s early fights at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill receive fresh attention. But lesser-known engagements at Moore’s Creek, Great Bridge, and Sullivan’s Island were watershed events. Such Patriot victories proved to be crushing setbacks to the King’s cause in the southern colonies, ensuring that the region would remain largely untouched by the war until 1780. Then there is America’s ill-fated attempt to wrest Canada from British control.. This is given lengthy attention here (really, that characterizes much of the book--brace yourself if you are looking for the Cliff Notes version). The entire campaign was a major undertaking during the first critical year of the war, but with the hindsight of over two centuries, it’s apparent that the affair was ill conceived, poorly supplied and, ultimately, badly led. The effort likewise siphoned tremendous resources and manpower from the Continental Army at a time when it could ill afford such diminution of its strength. British efforts would be narrowly focused in the north, and led to a year of disaster for the Patriot cause. From the pages of Atkinson’s book, George Washington clearly emerges as the “indispensable man” of the Revolution, but a commander who nonetheless faced an embarrassing string of battlefield drubbings subsequent to the British invasion of New York during the summer of 1776. After the near collapse of the Continental Army – and the Patriot war effort – during the retreat across New Jersey, Washington gambled big, and won, during his desperate attacks on Crown detachments at Trenton and Princeton. Atkinson’s closing chapters offer a riveting account of the legendary winter campaign that turned the tide of the war.