A Book A Week - Week 51: George Washington's Secret Six

This week's book:
  George Washington's Secret Six   by Brian Kilmeade*  with Don Yeager

  Grade: B-

I'm no Revolutionary War scholar, but this book brings a new dimension to my understanding of the Founding Fathers and exactly how they won the war.

It's established fact in primary education that the Patriots were outmanned, outgunned, and out-supplied for almost every military engagement of the Revolutionary War.  The stories of the privations of Valley Forge, for instance, are common knowledge.  And the conventional wisdom - perhaps taught, perhaps not - is that the Patriots just had more pluck, luck, courage, and fortitude than the British.  That Americans won their independence through grit and determination more than anything else.

And that may be true.  Mostly.  But it did always seem to me a very simplistic explanation.  Very rarely does the complete underdog overcome the kind of odds the Patriots faced without some kind of secret advantage.  Turns out that advantage was spies.

General Washington was no stranger to a guerilla war, he did fight for the British in the French Indian War.  But this book shows how he pressed his advantage, which was the entrenched population of New York, to build a spy network that provided him a strategic and intelligence advantage the British could not overcome.  Not that they didn't try, they turned General Benedict Arnold to their side, after all.

This was an enlightening read, and well done.  I had to give it a B-, though, because it's classed as an 'historical novel,' whatever that is.
    Basically, the author(s) chose to make the narrative more of a story than an account of facts.  Which I can't really fault them for, I've read some very dry non-fiction this year.  I have to give them a thumbs-up for trying to mix it up to make the facts of the story more appealing to masses.

But the facts suffer for it.  There are accounts of conversations, for example, where there is no record of any such conversation existing.  Or accounts of the thoughts of real, historical figures without the corresponding backing documents.  The book aspires to scholarship, and it does shed light on a previously dark part of American history, but it muddies the academic waters with liberal dramatic license. 

 * yes, I know he's a Fox News shill.  I prefer to treat them better than they treat others, and assume that Mr. Kilmeade may have something to contribute despite his reprehensible day job and my opinion of how he does it.

Next week:
I have no idea what I'll read for the last week of Book a Week.  We'll see what Santa brings tomorrow.